THE BOOK OF THE 
SPIRITUAL LIFE 



THE BOOK OF THE ,,; 
SPIRITUAL LIFE 



BY THE LATE 

LADY DILKE 



WITH A MEMOIR OF THE AUTHOR 
BY THE RT. HON. SIR CHARLES W. DILKE, Ex., M.P. 



WITH PORTRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS 



NEW YORK 
E. P. BUTTON AND COMPANY 

1905 






Printed in Great Britain 



ri 



PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SOhfS, LIMITED, 
LONDON AND BECCLES. 



" The path of a good woman is 
indeed strewn with flowers ; but they 
rise behind her steps. . . ."— RUSKIN, 
" Sesame and Lilies." 



b 2 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

MEMOIR I 

PHE BOOK OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE ... 129 
5H0RT STORIES— 

THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 235 

THE LAST HOUR 261 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



TO 'FACE PAGE 

E. Francis Strong ... ... ... Frontispiece 

(Fro7n a photograph, 1861. ) 

E. F. S. Pattison ... ... ... ... ... 24 ' 

(From a water-colour drawing by [Pauline] LM.dy Trevelyan, 1864.) 

Thumb-nail Sketch of the Bonne ... ... ... 45 

(From a letter.) 

View from Mrs. P.\ttison'.s Tower at Grasse, 1876-7 51 

[From a pe7i-and-ink drawing by herself.) 

Mrs. Pattison's Dr.aguignan Garden ... ... ... 59 ' 

(From a pen-and-ink drawing by herself.) 

A "Boggart."' ("They are made of straw, like this") ... 64 

Facsimile of a Pen-and-ink Sketch and Part of a 

Letter from Mrs. Pattison, dated March 9, 1883 83 

" L'Etendard du 3'^ Cuirassier"' ... ... ... 117 ' 

(Mrs. Pattison s working notes of Detaille's pictttre ; also called 
" Le Drapeaii.") 

Lady Dilke ... ... Frontispiece to Second Part 

(From a photograph by Mr. Thomson, September, 1904.) 



MEMOIR 



Lady Dilke was one of several children of an Indian 
officer, Captain Henry Strong. After his retirement 
from the Company's service, he was connected with 
the London and County Bank, and for some time 
managed the Oxford branch. His father and uncle 
had been two of the most sturdy among the United 
Empire Loyalists of Georgia, a state which, in the 
War of Independence, had at first been divided equally 
between Whigs and Tories. Lady Dilke was proud 
of this descent, and glad, in the early days of revived 
interest in the United Empire Loyalists, to claim 
admission to their society as the grandchild of Samuel 
S. Strong, Deput}^ Surveyor-General of Georgia before 
the war. Sometimes on Dominion Day she would 
wear their badge. Samuel Strong had been employed 
by the Crown in Virginia and in South Carolina, as 
well as in his own province. His name appears 
among those who signed, along with the Governor, 
the Oath of Allegiance in 1774 — a document preserved 
at Savannah by the Historical Society of Georgia. 
In 1899 Lady Dilke wrote, for the Annual Transac- 
tions of the United Empire Loyalists Association, an 
article on the Georgia Loyalists, and told the story of 
the life of her grandfather and great-uncle. Besides 
being public officials of the survey service graced by 
Washington, they had property in Augusta, Georgia, 
and a Crown grant on which a portion of the city 

B 



2 MEMOIR 

of Savannah stands. Their connection with the 
place is said to be preserved in the name "Strong's 
Bluff." 

The violent feeling which was evoked by the 
refusal of Georgia to send representatives to the 
Congress of 1774 marked out the Strongs for 
the hostility of the Whigs, and Captain Strong's uncle 
was tarred and feathered for his loyalty to the British 
Crown. Lady Dilke, with an acute remembrance of 
her father's accounts of his father, with an elder sister 
living who remembered the grandfather himself, and 
with the portraits of the hunted Loyalists of 1774 
hanging by her side, seemed to revive in living force 
the story of the War of Independence. Captain 
Strong had heard from his father how he had been 
allowed to return and dispose of a portion of his 
lands. To his daughter, Lady Dilke's aunt, Nancy 
Strong, on her marriage with one of his own way of 
thinking, Samuel Strong gave his remaining property 
at Augusta. From that point the history of the 
Americans sprung from Nancy Strong has been told 
by her descendant, Colonel Barrett, a veteran of the 
Confederate Army. Lady Dilke had with her to the 
last some leaves, in a paper cover marked by her 
" From the old home at Augusta, Georgia," and these 
she carried along with the most valued pictures of 
those she loved. 

Captain Strong had been an Addiscombe cadet, 
and had left for his regiment in India in 1809, retiring 
sixteen years afterwards, and six years before his 
father's death. 

There was traceable in Lady Dilke a close personal 
resemblance to her American grandfather, the indi- 
viduality of whose head, as depicted in portraits, 
came out in her in later years. There was also in her 
character a good deal of the toughness of the fierce 
colonial defenders of the lost cause of George III., 



EARLY TASTE FOR DRAWING 3 

and, advanced as were her opinions on many subjects 
at many times, she retained throughout life their 
unconquerable physical and moral courage and their 
characteristic virtue of not allowing the largeness of 
a majority to convince her that she was wrong. 

The inclination of Lady Dilke towards art was 
partly hereditary, but mainly personal and natural. 
Her father painted well for an amateur, and was no 
doubt pleased to find power of drawing in his child ; 
but this tendency was not noticed in any other member 
of a large family, and was pursued as a personal 
pleasure by this one daughter. Her governess. Miss 
Bowdich, though a notable teacher, did little to 
develop it, and indeed would have preferred more 
time to be given to studies in which she was herself 
more competent. The art turn was developed at an 
early age. Francis Strong, as in those days she pre- 
ferred to be called (after a godfather and favourite 
friend, a Mr. Francis Whiting, killed at Cawnpore 
in the Mutiny), signed with her child's autograph, 
"E. Francis Strong, 185 1," when she was eleven, a 
book, Sir Charles Bell's " Essays on the Anatomy of 
Expression in Painting." This, I believe, she had 
bought herself with her first pocket-money, though by 
no means cheap, and she gave it to me as her most 
cherished possession, with the signature, under the 
other, "Emilia F. S. Dilke, 1885," on our wedding-day. 
As a child she drew in pen and ink, with much native 
power of composition, a series of original historical 
cartoons, and two of them have been thought by 
critics to be worth preservation and exhibition. She 
designed, before she first came to London as an art 
student, some lace patterns. One of these (for Honi- 
ton Point) afterwards won the Bath and West of 
England first prize in 1867, and others have recently, 
after forty-eight to fifty years, been executed in new 
lace-making schools. 



4 MEMOIR 

Lady Dilke's eldest sister writes that her drawings 
from the Oxford casts were "shown to Ruskin . . . 
when he was visiting Dr. Acland, and it was he who 
determined her to go to South Kensington to study 
anatomy. Our dear mother strongly objected to her 
going, but through friends a home near the schools 
was found." Dr. Ince, now Regius Professor of 
Divinity in the University of Oxford, recalls in a 
letter to me the precautions taken, in order to please 
her mother, that Miss Strong "should not be left to 
walk home unaccompanied " in London. I have in 
my possession a copy of Tennyson's " Idylls of the 
King," bought by Dr. Ince to give to the young 
student in 1859, as an additional reward for the power 
displayed by her, according to Ruskin, in drawing 
from the skeleton and from life. Mrs. Hullah, one of 
her oldest friends, writes of the same days to recall 
the immense power and unremitting practice of work 
already displayed by Miss Strong — characteristics 
constant, indeed, throughout life. Even the holidays 
were spent, she says, almost entirely in work, and the 
Sunday afternoons at Little Holland House in conver- 
sation bearing upon it. Of Mulready, as her master, 
Mrs. Hullah says, " I seem to see the old man's hand- 
some but satirical face ripple all over with a welcoming 
smile as he saw the little figure come trotting in with 
a portfolio of drawings on her arm, attired in extremely 
unconventional, but often very picturesque, garments 
floating behind her. She was good to look at in the 
freshness of her youth, expressing, as every move- 
ment did, a boundless delight in mere existence." At 
Little Holland House G. F. Watts was the chief 
adviser. He " took a more than ordinary interest in 
her and her work, of which he had a high opinion." 
She had made a series of designs for " Elaine," which 
Watts showed " to Tennyson, who was staying in the 
house, and came in while Francesca (Miss E. Francis 



ARTIST FRIENDS 5 

Strong) was in the studio." Miss Strong revived also 
at Little Holland House her acquaintance with Millais, 
on whose knees she had sat as a child, when she had 
directed him to draw for her a spirited sketch of a 
cavalry battle under Stirling Castle. It hangs now 
in my room at Pyrford Rough alongside her chair, 
and bears also on its back a portrait by her father. 

Millais' drawing seems to have been executed for 
Miss Strong about 1849, when he was working on his 
Lorenzo, in the year which saw the establishment of 
that Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, to which reference 
will be made. But the armoured knights and the 
pikemen of the reserves show no trace of the prin- 
ciples of Ford Madox Brown, or of the companionship 
of Holman Hunt and Rossetti. 

When she visited her family near Oxford during 
the vacations, the Aclands and Dr. Ince were friends 
who continued to take deep interest in her work, 
together with Goldwin Smith, also an Oxford friend 
before her marriage. Professors Ince and Goldwin 
Smith, lifelong friends, remain to mourn her loss. 
Ruskin wrote to her up to his last years, and with 
the Acland family also her friendship continued 
throughout life. The influence which, earlier than 
that of Mark Pattison, was impressed upon her, was 
Ruskin's; but from Ruskin, deeply influenced as she 
was by him, she differed at every point. Writing 
after her second marriage, Ruskin said, " I thought 
3'ou always one of my terriblest, unconquerablest, 
and antagonisticest . . . powers. . . . When you sat 
studying Renaissance with me in the Bodleian, I 
supposed you to intend contradicting everything I 
had ever said about art-history or social science. . . . 
My dear child, what have you ever done in my way, 
or as I bid ? . . . I am really very, very, affection- 
ately and respectfully yours. — J. Ruskin." Her reply, 
which was addressed from yG, Sloane Street, S.W., 



6 MEMOIR 

March 23, 1887, to "My dear Master," told him that 
"so big a person as you ought to understand that 
others may and must receive from you much which 
must be dealt with according to " their own character 
and circumstances. Lady Dilke thought that the 
"'not doing as one is bid' is often the sincerest and 
highest form of obedience in things spiritual." Lady 
Dilke went on to argue that "to live as simply as 
possible for truth in all things, and to try to deal with 
all people in love and justice," constituted substantial 
compliance with Ruskin's teaching, even "if it is not 
done quite your way." Ruskin was not immediately 
convinced, and later again, in 1887, he wrote, "To 
obey me is to love Turner and hate Raphael, to love 
Goethe and hate Renaissance." All the same, the 
main influence in her life before 1862 was that of 
Ruskin's teaching, as the main influence in the early 
years of her first marriage was the scholarship of 
Mark Pattison. 

Although Lady Dilke lived to write of the Re- 
naissance, and, worse still, some would say, of the 
academic School of Louis XIV. and of the eighteenth 
century, yet it was, nevertheless, towards architecture 
and sculpture, and in the next place towards orna- 
ment, and the application of the arts in industry, that 
her mind first turned ; and her studies in painting- 
followed much later on. To the end of her life it was 
the philosophy of aesthetics, the history of art and its 
connection with the history of organized and civilized 
states, and, in art itself, architecture and sculpture, 
that roused her most. She travelled to Berlin, to 
Stockholm, and to other distant places, latterly with 
me, in order to see pictures, as a duty to herself and 
to her work ; but she went to see the clays and 
drawings of a new sculptor — such, for example, as 
Rodin was till 1880— as she went to cities of archi- 
tecture like Bordeaux and Nancy, or to treasures of 



HOURS SPENT IN SKETCHING 7 

drawing such as those of Lille, with a more real 
delight. At Berlin, indeed, though we had journeyed 
thither to visit again the French eighteenth-century 
pictures, she spent more time, certainly with more 
pleasure, in the new room of the Greek sculptures. 
These she was able to compare with those introduced 
to her by Sir Charles Newton, and with those which 
she had visited with me in Greece. 

Little of the work of her hand survives, except in 
the form of tiny pencil sketches made while she was 
standing before statues or pictures in galleries. To 
the last, when her time was valuable, as the advance 
of years and medical injunctions as to the need of rest 
made it uncertain if she would be able to complete the 
books she had mapped out, she would spend endless 
hours sketching in pen and ink (without caring even 
to preserve the result) some noble design of antiquity 
or of the Renaissance which had struck her fancy. It 
needed actual theft on my part and on that of her 
friends to save occasionally the results of all this toil, 
for toil it seemed to others — of pure enjoyment to 
herself. After our marriage she began, in accordance 
with the wishes of Mark Pattison as to the disposal of 
his money, to set aside a certain fixed proportion of 
her income for buying books, other than those needed 
for her daily work. For the fine editions — especially 
of the Latin and Italian classics — destined, along with 
the working books, for the Art Library at South 
Kensington, a book-plate was required. The designs 
for the stamps, together with some at Oxford for 
wood-carving and some in metal at our London house, 
are the few pieces of her own work intended by her 
for preservation. 

At Ruskin's suggestion her father had brought her 
to London in 1858, when I made her acquaintance. 
We were members of the South Kensington trap-bat 
club, which played, at that time, in the orchard of 



8 MEMOIR 

Gore House. W. M. Thackeray, whose daughters 
were members, was often present as a spectator, but 
was rather my friend than hers. 

Miss E. F. Strong is shown by the books of the 
South Kensington Art Schools to have become a 
regular attendant in March, 1859, the year of my own 
South Kensington Prize, and to have passed and 
obtained prizes in two subjects in i860. I have, how- 
ever, always remembered that we won Queen's Prizes 
in the same year, and have in my possession a draw- 
ing of hers, dated 1859, officially stamped as "ex- 
amined " and " medal awarded," and I have the medal 
inscribed with her name and the same date, so that 
the South Kensington books do not appear to be 
complete. In the same year, 1859, she began to draw 
from the nude, under the direction of Mulready, and 
I find, dated from that year, a study from the nude by 
her, which Mulready pronounced "excellent." 

When, with a slender purse. Miss Strong worked 
in London at her art studies, up to February, 1861, 
she shared with the friend who afterwards became 
Mrs. Hullah a small room high up in a house under 
the control of a lady who had the confidence of the 
families of both. Mrs. Hullah tells me, that they 
neither of them liked the joint arrangement, but made 
it " tolerable by drawing a chalk line " across the 
room, by way of boundary, and compiling a code of 
minute rules "to maintain our separate rights." 
Though such intimate and mutually self-respecting 
friends that they afterwards voluntarily studied to- 
gether upon the Continent, they each had so strong a 
love of personal independence as to have little of 
their spiritual life in common. 

Lady Dilke has written that she was brought up 
under a strict High Church training; but it must not 
be assumed from this statement, true though it is, 
that she did not go at one time far beyond her 



PUSEYISM 9 

teachers. When she was a child her mother used to 
take her to great numbers of Church functions, with 
a strong desire to inculcate a strict Church train- 
ing, rather than a specially " Puseyite " training, as 
the epithet of those days went. " Francis," differing 
in this from all her sisters, developed for herself, 
when she came to London and was away from the 
maternal eye and the "chaff" of a large family, 
an ultra-Puseyism concealed from those at home. 
Already, in 1854, she had scandalized her family by 
praying publicly for the success of the Russian arms 
during the Crimean War, partly, I think, because 
ever3^body about her was agreed in ferocious anti- 
Russian opinion, but also partly because she believed 
that the Russians were a more devoutly Christian 
people than were their British, French, and Italian, 
not to mention Turkish, foes. She lived to take a 
different view in recent times. In 1859, Miss Strong 
used to horrify her ordinary Church friends by her 
studies in dissection and anatomy and by her fearless 
advocacy of the necessity of drawing from the nude ; 
but, at the same time, still more greatly to shock 
them by her habit of doing penance for the smallest 
fault, imaginary or real, by lying for hours on the 
bare floor or on the stones, with her arms in the 
attitude of the cross. While she was sharing one 
room with Mrs. Hullah, and during all the time in 
1859 and i860 when I used to be patronized by her, 
regarding her with the awe of a hobbledehoy of six- 
teen or seventeen towards a beautiful girl of nineteen 
or twenty, she used to attend by herself the early 
Communion at Brompton church. There is no trace 
whatever, and was not at the time, of any personal 
influence by any one of the family, of the clergy, or of 
friends, having led her in this direction, and I think 
that the same may be said of her later phase of 
spiritual thought, when, abandoning, as she did for 

c 



10 MEMOIR 

years, the services of the Church, she threw herself 
into the Positivist movement. 

In an article which Lady Dilke published in 1897 
under the title "The Idealist Movement and Positive 
Science : an Experience," she traces her own spiritual 
development to her early studies in the works of St. 
Augustine and of the Fathers, a study directed, she 
said, by the desire to find confirmation and support 
of her Church principles. She went on to show how, 
as she mastered the conception of the ecclesiastical 
polit}^, her religious views gradually assumed less and 
less of an emotional character ; how she gave up con- 
fession and penance, but held fast to the ethical system 
taught by the fathers of the Church ; how she came 
later to find in the preface to Comte's Catechism a 
possession enabling her to face the anarchy caused 
by the shock to her beliefs following upon her marriage 
with Mark Pattison and her introduction to an in- 
tellectual society at Oxford not animated b}^ faith in 
revealed religion. The two books which alone she 
carried about and read throughout her life — com- 
panions in her Puseyite, in her Comtist, in her latter, 
as well as, literally, in her last days — were a Latin 
" Imitation " and an Italian Dante. The Dante, bound 
for " E. F. Strong, 1858," is interleaved with her notes, 
dated "1859," and shows most careful study of the 
text. To work on Dante she had returned, in 1904, and 
the posthumous "Book of Life" contains passages 
which my friend Mr. A. J. Butler, with whom she had 
sometimes discussed them, has most kindly revised 
for this volume. She always recognized the duty of 
self-abnegation, or what she called "the paramount 
moral obligation of self-sacrifice," and constantly de- 
clared that the " Imitation " offered to her, of all 
single books, "the richest nourishment," while admit- 
ting that so far as the sense of duty to one's self 
should form part of one's general conception of duty, 



A GIRLISH PROTEST ii 

the " Imitation " failed. I write now with complete 
knowledge of a character as hopeless a mystery to me 
in 1859 as to all her acquaintance of those days. 

We were all puzzled by the apparent conflict 
between the vitality and the impish pranks of the 
brilliant student, expounding to us the most heterodox 
of social views, and the "bigotry" which we seemed 
to discern when we touched her spiritual side. She 
was the ringleader at South Kensington in a girlish 
protest against the impertinence, as the students 
thought it, of a lieutenant of engineers attached for 
duty at the schools. The distinguished general, as 
he became, now dead, lived to recall in a most charm- 
ing letter to her, his real penitence for an offence 
which he admitted, at the close of his career, to have 
been his own, not hers, but for which Francis Strong 
was haled before no less august a body than "the 
Lord President" and his advisers. The officer of 
engineers had placed upon the official screen a notice 
that " the young lady who had taken away " his dog 
was instantly to return it to the owner. Whether 
any young lady had taken away his dog I know not ; 
certainly Miss Strong had not ; but in the indignation 
that all felt and she alone had the courage, rebelliously, 
to express, she wrote in a large hand and affixed to 
the Government official notice board, a bill beginning, 
"Lost, strayed, or stolen, a sandy haired puppy 

answering to the name of Lieutenant " ; the cause 

of the official inquiry in all its solemnity being ordered. 
When brought before the tribunal, she at once stated 
that the notice was hers. One of the greatest of her 
traducers said, "To do her justice, Miss Strong has 
not disguised her hand ;" on which she merely looked 
at him. The authorities were as embarrassed as any 
body of gentlemen would be under the circumstances, 
and Miss Strong was dismissed with a mild wish, 
meekly expressed, that nothing of the kind should 



12 MEMOIR 

happen again. Ruskin, writing to her and me in his 
last years, said that he thought her at Kensington 
"the sauciest of girls," but he blessed at the same 
time some pages of "Queens' Gardens" which had 
been written out by her as an exemplar on their 
appearance in 1864. Ruskin wrote, " Brantwood. The 
author is enchanted by the sight of himself in this 
lovely manuscript, and becomes, on account of it, an 
extremely happy and Proud Queen's Gardener." 

Putting together all that any of us know of her life 
before her marriage, I think there can be no doubt of 
the existence in Miss Strong of the rare combination 
of intense vitality, high spirits, and delight in life, with 
rigid devotion to a spiritual ideal, accompanied by 
constant self-discipline. In the days of her extreme 
" Puseyite " practices there was not the faintest trace 
of the hysterical. Sanity of mind and judgment 
accompanied the daily practice of forms which in most 
people and to most people would seem to imply the 
contrary. To the practice of confession and of penance 
she came, not by imitation — in defiance rather of all 
about her and of every influence — but by a strictly 
logical process, by calm thought, and by historical 
study. She used to say, and even, with her invariable 
straightforwardness, often " brutality," of intellect, to 
write, though most people do not write these things, 
that she had always been from time to time subject to 
hallucinations; but the account she gave of these 
showed that, with the exception of an early belief — 
not infrequent in childhood — in angel visits, the hallu- 
cinations were, as with most of us, invariably the 
result of overwork, and always within the control of 
will. At the same time, she would never have stored 
up in her mind for all the years of her life the 
sketches which she ultimately published in "The 
Shrine of Death" and "The Shrine of Love," and 
those she has left behind her, had she not (a little 



HALLUCINATIONS 13 

wilfully, I think) allowed her mind to stray off in 
fantastic directions. She noted down, with her 
habitual minute care, all the apparitions of her life, 
but they were for the most part cases of the calling 
up of well-known persons, in times when physical 
weakness was coupled with speculative study. I 
think it right to give some instances in her own 
words, inasmuch as they bear on the development 
of her life and character. 

" The first ' hallucination ' of which I can give an 
exact account occurred to me at the age of five or six. 
I woke, shortly after going to sleep, in a dark room, 
and saw a patch of brilliant light, and in the light the 
figures of two or more angels bending towards me. 
The vision was a delight to me, I being a very devout 
child. The incredulity with which my account of it 
was received by my elders I tried to meet by giving 
details, such as that ' the angels wore blue boots,' 
which, of course, provoked a ridicule which taught 
me to keep silence, but such details serve to show 
that the vision was perfectly distinct in all its parts. 

" As I grew up, and every now and then made 
statements as to servants or friends having done 
things, or having been in places, the truth of which 
they denied, I was punished for 'lying' or 'inventing,' 
as I believed unjustly. In the light of later experi- 
ences I have no doubt that I was frequently the subject 
of ' hallucinations.' 

" The first, which I was in a position to recognize 
as such, occurred during the Indian Mutiny. Several 
members of our family were in danger; one night on 
which we had all been talking late of them, after we 
had gone upstairs to bed, I stood before my dressing- 
table plaiting my hair, when my attention was arrested 
by a faint spot in the centre of the mirror. This, to 
my amazement, gradually enlarged (as a grease spot 
spreads with heat) until the whole surface was covered. 



14 MEMOIR 

and then, in the centre of this veil, came-through the 
face of one of the near relatives above mentioned, as 
plain as might have been his living reflexion. To a 
moment of spell-bound fascination succeeded frantic 
terror, and I rushed out of my room ; there was, how- 
ever, no one I dared tell ; my father would have 
admonished me not to be a fool : as for my mother, 
then in delicate health, I could not venture to name 
such a matter to her, the appearance having been that 
of her only son. I noted, however, the day and hour, 
and ascertained, six weeks later, that the relative seen 
had incurred no sort of danger at that date." 

In connection with other hallucinations she 
noted : — 

" Before I close what I have to say on the 
subject of these visual hallucinations, I have two 
other points to mention in this connection : 

" I. That I have strong visual memory which for 
years I cultivated to the point of being able, having 
looked with that intention at pictures, or other works 
of art, to recall them, by an effort of will, many weeks 
after, with such distinctness that I could set down 
from the visualised image full and accurate details of 
composition and colour. 

" 2. That I have eyes of different focus. The 
centre of vision of the right eye deflects to the right. 
If I am not wearing glasses there is a moment of con- 
sciousness when I look to the left as the effort is 
made to bring the two sights together. 

"Auditory 'hallucinations' have been less frequent 
in my case than the visual ones. These were occa- 
sionally voices calling, — always voices I could recog- 
nize, but more often musical sounds. One example 
will suffice. I woke in the night, during a period of 
convalescence after a serious illness, as children say, 
'broad awake,' with a curious sense of alert attention. 
Within half a minute or so I heard a perfectly pure 



PRAYERS AND MEDITATIONS 15 

note in mid-air ; the sound was extremely low at first, 
but went on swelling by imperceptible degrees until 
it reached a climax, at which the volume was such 
that I wondered the house was not roused ; at its full, 
when it had become almost painful to listen, it snapped 
off short in ringing stillness. 

" You ask me to explain what I mean when I say 
that the will can affect these 'hallucinations.' I do 
not mean that at the instant of their occurrence the 
will can do anything beyond keep the brain steady. 
I have, however (you must take it for what it is worth), 
an intimate conviction and consciousness that there 
was a period w^hen physical weakness, coupled with 
the moral dispositions which accompany a mystic and 
speculative bias of mind, might have caused me (let 
me confess further, were near causing me) to take 
passive satisfaction in my own ' hallucinations ' 
instead of treating them as matter for investigation. 
I am conscious that in that state they were tending 
to become more frequent. 

" Remember, they have had, always, a powerful, 
unconscious ally in the strong visual memory, which 
I cultivated for purposes of my own convenience. 

" In conclusion, I have to say that for some years 
I have almost entirely ceased to be disturbed by any 
such 'apparitions' or auditory 'hallucinations,' and 
that during these years I have been steadily gaining 
in health and in what is called 'tone.'" 

Of the early period there remains in Miss Strong's 
own hand little except pra^^ers and spiritual medi- 
tations. One at least of these would be worth giving 
here, were it not that I cannot be sure that it is her 
own : all may be translations from the Latin of the 
Fathers. They are, moreover, replaced by the little 
work on the Spiritual Life to which this memoir 
forms a preface. It constitutes, indeed, her final will 
and testament to all of us, completed as it was by a 



1 6 MEMOIR 

page written for that purpose on one of her six 
last days. 

A great deal of light is thrown upon the earl}' 
years, before marriage, by a correspondence which 
took place later with George Eliot ; for George Eliot 
was interested in the earlier religious phase and in 
the change from Puseyism to Comtism, so that the 
letters in many points date back before their time and 
should be dealt with here. 

In the obituary notices which appeared on the 
death of Lady Dilke, some of the newspapers allowed 
themselves to write of her as having suggested the 
heroine of " Middlemarch." To those who know, 
Emilia Strong was no more Dorothea Brooke than 
Pattison was Casaubon ; but it is the case that the 
religious side of Dorothea Brooke was taken by 
George Eliot from the letters of Mrs. Pattison, as she 
had become before the correspondence. A great 
many both of the more intimate letters which were 
returned, and of the answers, have been destroyed ; 
but it is impossible to compare the Prelude and 
several passages in the first book of " Middlemarch " 
with passages still existing in the diaries and manu- 
scripts of Miss Strong, penned before 1862, and not 
to see whence came George Eliot's knowledge of the 
religious ideal of her Dorothea Brooke. The state- 
ment in the Prelude, that "to common eyes" the 
'' struggles " of modern " Theresas " " seemed mere 
inconsistency and formlessness," is the very reproach 
to which the posthumous writing that follows in 
this volume unintentionally makes reply. It was of 
Emilia Strong that George Eliot was thinking when 
she wrote " Dorothea knew many passages of Pascal's 
'Pensees' and of Jeremy Taylor by heart," and of her, 
too, as she was at "the schools" in 1859, praying as 
" fervidly as if she thought herself living in the time 
of the Apostles," with " strange whims of fasting like 



MIDDLEMARCH 17 

a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old 
theological books." In Lady Dilke's article, " The 
Idealist Movement and Positive Science : an Expe- 
rience," and in her posthumous book, which she 
proposed to call "The Book of the Spiritual Life," 
we find expressed Dorothea's doctrine of "that 
spiritual religion, that submergence of self in com- 
munion with Divine perfection," which is shown by 
George Eliot's replies to have marked the account 
given in the earlier letters. If I am to anticipate 
the next part of this memoir, and to deal once and 
for all with a subject always distasteful to my wife, 
Dorothea's defence of her marriage with Casaubon, 
and Casaubon's account of his marriage to Dorothea 
in the first book of " Middlemarch," are as a fact 
given by the novelist almost in Mark Pattison's 
words. Here the matter ends. The grotesque at- 
tempt to find a likeness between a mere pedant like 
George Eliot's Casaubon and a great scholar like 
Mark Pattison, or between the somewhat babelike 
Dorothea and the powerful personality of the sup- 
posed protot3^pe, was never made by any one who 
knew the Rector of Lincoln and Mrs. Pattison. The 
subject is named here only because it illustrates the 
interest attendant on such insight into a human soul 
as is given in " The Book of the Spiritual Life," which, 
as she said herself, " I sometimes call ' My Book of 
Praise ' or ' My Book of Life.' " 

It is this first part of the life, ending with the 
marriage to Mark Pattison in 1861, that illustrates 
the one side of a nature in which there was admittedly 
the " struggle," though it involved none of the " incon- 
sistency " disclaimed in George Eliot's " Prelude." 

In the life of Lady Dilke no influence ever ended. 
During the first period, Ruskin, in spite of the fiercest 
differences, had been the influential teacher ; but her 
reverence for scholarship, in the person of Mark 

D 



1 8 MEMOIR 

Pattison, put no end to the art interests of Miss 
Strong. She widened her conception of art by the 
teaching of the philosopher, and by the study of the 
literatures to which the schoohng of Mark Pattison 
admitted her. She saw, too, men and things, travelled 
largely with him, became mistress of many tongues, 
and gained, above all, a breath of desire for all human 
knowledge, destined only to grow with the advance 
of years. 

The continuity of work which throughout life, for 
nearly half a century, knew no intermission, and the 
studies of a powerful mind which never took a day's 
whole holiday, made possible a survey of the field of 
knowledge such as has been given to few people in 
our time. 

In September, 1861, Mark Pattison had wedded 
Miss Strong at the church of Iffley, where her father 
and mother lived, the service being performed by the 
Rev. William Tuckwell, her brother-in-law, who, in 
1904, read, by my wish, the words of committal in her 
funeral service at Holy Trinity, Sloane Street. 

Immediately on her marriage Mrs. Pattison began 
to work for and with her husband. Italian she already 
knew. Without discontinuing her art work, she 
acquired a sufficient grasp of Latin, of German, and 
of French, to conquer the greatest treasures of those 
literatures ; and whenever in later life the fancy led 
her to read, in the original, Greek, Spanish, Portu- 
guese, Dutch, or Provencal, she was able, by taking 
pains, at least to make out the essentials. Within 
the last month of her life she was improving her 
Swedish and attacking Welsh, and this, not as the 
serious business of any day, but as little side-paths 
of her great roadway of work, and as mere additional 
interests, in a life already — one would have thought — 
sufficiently well filled. 

Of all the periods of her life when, to judge by 



INFLUENCE OF RUSKIN 19 

results, she worked with the most Benedictine appli- 
cation, that of the first years of her marriage with 
Mark Pattison must be pronounced supreme ; 3^et it 
was at this very moment that she gave the most care 
to the social side of life, and created in Oxford some- 
thing not unlike a " salon." At the same time, also, 
in order to increase her personal income, she began 
to write much for publication, and was indeed a 
considerable contributor to the Saturday Review. 

The influence of Ruskin continued, even when 
she was mastering philosophy and tongues. In the 
second volume of Wright's " History of King Arthur " 
there is reported, in her hand, one of Ruskin's lectures, 
delivered after Mrs. Pattison's marriage. This was 
a favourite book from the day when it was given, by 
her sister and her sister's husband, January i, 1859, 
until she was able to purchase for herself in later 
life the various earlier versions (French and English) 
of the Legend. She had, no doubt, taken the volume 
with her to read while she was kept waiting for the 
beginning of the lecture, and then, being struck with 
the manner in which Ruskin preached at the students, 
and, perhaps she might think, specially at her, began 
to take down his maxims on the fly-leaves and ■ the 
narrow margins of the unoffending book. 

From 1 86 1 for many years she signed " E. F. S. 
Pattison," the " S," which stood for her family name 
of Strong, being introduced by her to mark her wish 
for some recognition of the independent existence of 
the woman, and in some resistance to the old English 
doctrine of complete merger in the husband. But 
there was no personal resistance to the influence 
over her of her husband. His mind and learning 
deserved the surrender of the educational direction 
of a young girl, however gifted, to his mental and 
philosophical control; and he obtained it. Although 
Full of love of personal liberty, she had an unusually 



\ i 



20 MEMOIR 

disciplined reverence for Authority as represented 
by those she thought really competent in ability and 
learning. She kept, however, an imaginative side 
and part of life, in which Mark Pattison was hardly 
allowed to share : to this she alluded as " Off hours 
of my own time." However hard Mrs. Pattison 
worked, for him, with him, or under his direction, 
there was always time for her favourite books, which 
were no favourites of his, and for the construction 
in her mind of the stories which long afterwards 
saw light in "The Shrine of Death" and "The Shrine 
of Love." The one unchanging habit of her life was 
that of daily pause for thought, generally accom- 
panied by some (to her) nearly mechanical occupa- 
tion, such as " making up " spoiled pages of old books. 
It was in these quiet times that such work of love as 
" The Book of the Spiritual Life " took shape. The 
other persistent habit should also be recalled — she 
never passed a day in life without at least some work at 
one of her less-known tongues. She was the first to 
disclaim scholarship for herself Her reading and her 
interests were too wide to make it humanly possible 
to her. After as gallant an attempt as any one ever 
made in modern times to survey all knowledge, she 
wrote, "the borders of human knowledge have been 
too greatly extended for complete mastery." She 
at least was able, largely through Mark Pattison's 
direction, to master enough of human knowledge in 
its principal branches to know the relation of almost 
every part of it to every other. 

The lifelong intention and desire in regard to 
knowledge were expressed in a later letter, which is 
one of many placed at my disposal by the Bibliotheque 
Nationale of France, being preserved in the Manu- 
scripts Department. Mrs. Pattison wrote: "Quelque- 
fois je pense meme que le plus bel usage que Ton puisse 
faire de sa propre vie serait de se vouer a tout savoir. 



MARK PATTISON^S FRIENDS 21 

a se rendre maitre — au moins dans sa signification 
generale — de tout ce que I'esprit liumain a conquis 
sur tous les terrains : — mais, j'ai quarante ans, et c est 
trop tard." In another letter on the same subject she 
added, " To seek is nearly as good as to find, for in 
seeking one finds also things one did not seek." 

While such tasks were on foot, the philosophical 
studies, which Mark Pattison encouraged at the ex- 
pense of her earlier theology, unsettled the foun- 
dations of her belief, and threw her for a short time 
into Comtism as a code sufficient to preserve her 
previously existing standard of duty. 

Some of Mark Pattison's friends, who became hers, 
helped her to resist any too absorbing influence of 
his actual opinions. She has herself recorded in 
some biographical notes, written in the French tongue, 
that Sir Charles Newton — the host of the Pattisons 
in London — afforded her a safety valve by rigid 
training given at the British Museum in Hellenic 
principles of classical art. George Eliot, like Newton, 
was the Rector of Lincoln's friend, and her influence 
too was different again, as was, in another order, that 
of Goldwin Smith. 

Mrs. Pattison has herself set down in French, which 
I translate, except where translation spoils the sense, 
how, " after some years of doubt and moral suffering, 
revolt became inevitable." Both her earlier and her 
later training failed, at the time, she wrote, " to allow 
me d'entrevoir le vrai sens metaphysique des idees 
religieuses which had been at my very heart, and, 
for a time, je repoussais, done, avec douleur toute 
conception surnaturelle : I took refuge in the philo- 
sophy of Comte, the only one that seemed to me 
at the moment to offer a method which even pro- 
fessed to systematize the prevailing anarchy of the 
times. The moral part of his teaching had so close 
an analogy with that of the Church, that, on that 



2 2 MEMOIR 

particular side, the transition presented to me no 
difficulty." We shall see later how, after recognizing 
the impossibility of regaining a complete view of 
life and of the universe through the emotions, she 
found once more in metaphysics the means of present- 
ing to the developed intelligence a scientific view of 
those very truths which the intelligence had rejected 
in their old form, when addressed to it through the 
emotions by religion. A writing of her earliest times 
shows that it was a flaw detected in Newman's 
reasoning through which all doubts came in. His 
ideal, as gathered from her reading, contained, "as a 
balance to its renunciations and its asceticism, the 
set-off of future reward " — called by Mark Pattison 
"payment by results." The same flaw which she 
had found in Newman and in the Fathers she was 
afterwards to believe she had detected in Comtism 
itself. 

Mark Pattison had become Rector of Lincoln a 
short time before his marriage, and he took at least as 
much interest in the receptions of his wife as she did 
herself Socially she " was a great success ; " but with- 
out much private satisfaction, and it was at this time 
that she wrote one of the stories afterwards published 
in "The Shrine of Death," of which the secret meaning 
is the emptiness of life at Oxford. In a notebook of 
the period I find a passage, also dated from Oxford in 
the early days, which puts it more plainly. " The worst 
to me of this life here is the sense of personal degra- 
dation which accompanies the exercise of what people 
call 'tact.' I feel more ashamed at small scheming 
than I should (I think) at a crime. There is some- 
thing morally lowering about ' management* Once 
out of it, however, it shakes ofi" like dirt. When days 
grow weeks, weeks months, months years, it seems 
as if one sank into the mire past hope, and a despair 
comes which is only a degree better than hardened 



LADY TREVELYAN 23 

cynicism. Surely one ought to find a way to keep an 
even freedom of soul under any conditions." 

At this time there arose a new influence in her life, 
destined however, unhappily, to be a short one as 
regards time measured by the 3'ears. Pauline, Lady 
Trevelyan, has left a considerable name, and a still 
more considerable correspondence, not 37et available 
to the world, although Ruskin's letters to her ought 
one day to see the light. She died early in 1866. 
Most of Mrs. Pattison's friends in the northern coun- 
ties were made by her when the Rector of Lincoln 
was occupying Bamborough, that "castle by the sea" 
from which she drew the scenes of some of her wildest 
stories, such as "The Serpent's Head." Mark Patti- 
son, as one of the Crewe trustees, resided with his 
wife at the Castle, officially known to them— not in 
Sir Walter Scott's spelling, but as " Bamburgh " — for 
three months in 1862, for six weeks in 1863, and in 
1864 for nearly as long a time. The arrangement 
involving periodical residence at the Castle ceased 
in 1865. Lady Trevelyan was an old acquaintance 
whom Miss Strong had met at the Aclands' at Oxford 
in earlier days. My wife has recorded, with regard 
to Mulready, the fact that "common affection and 
admiration for Lady Trevelyan (Pauline Jermyn) had 
made us friends," and that it was Lady Trevelyan 
who first took her to Mulready's studio before she 
began to work under him. Lady Dilke's visits to 
Sir Walter Trevelyan's at Wallington probably pre- 
ceded, as well as followed, her marriage to Mark 
Pattison, but until search can be made there for 
her letters and those of W. B. Scott, all this is 
doubtful. There is in my possession a most in- 
teresting early oil portrait of Lady Dilke by Lady 
Trevelyan, representing her engaged in painting, in 
the hall at Wallington, a sunflower on a pilaster 
among the pictures executed there by W. B. Scott. 



24 MEMOIR 

Sir George Trevelyan, who has been kind enough to 
assist me in a search for dates, is of opinion that the 
sunflowers were painted at a later visit than one 
she made in the year of her marriage, and before 
his return from India in 1864. He believes that he 
remembers seeing the sunflowers on that occasion for 
the first time. In the second volume of the autobio- 
graphical notes of William Bell Scott, published in 
1892, I find that he has written: "The decoration 
of Wallington, however, left room for other artistic 
labours besides my own, which deserve to be recorded. 
In one of Lady Trevelyan's letters, . , . she speaks of 
Holman Hunt's going there to paint a pilaster, and 
Ruskin's visit to do so has been mentioned. Hunt 
never managed to do this, but Arthur Hughes and 
others did, especially Mrs. Mark Pattison, at that 
time lately married to the Master of Lincoln, and one 
of the most perfectly lovely women in the world. 
She is now distinguishing herself in literature, but 
then she gave proof of great ability in painting. . . ." 
Lady Trevelyan's health was so bad in 1864 and till 
her death, that the visits even of intimate friends 
ceased, and the sunflowers themselves were never 
finished. She exercised great influence over the mind 
of her girl friend, who was five or six years younger 
than herself, and my wife kept her portrait in a locket 
to the last. 

The costume in which Mrs. Pattison was painted 
by Lady Trevel3''an is that of the Venetian colour 
revival, inaugurated by Dante Rossetti and his 
friends. Her hair is rightly depicted as of a bright 
gold, very difl'erent from the duller colour it assumed 
during the years of her life following on her first 
great illness, of 1867-8. W. B. Scott, who was present 
at the sittings in Northumberland, also painted her 
himself in 1864, as did an unidentified artist, "J. P.," 
perhaps Portaels the Belgian, in Paris, in the same 




f/3^/'Z^^^^ 



li^^/^T?'^- 



^ 



I 



i 



THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND 25 

3xar. The likeness between these three portraits is 
distinct, and they are all very diiferent from the 
portraits before 1862 and after 1874. The massive 
construction of the head was much more marked in 
childhood and up to the twenty-first or twenty-second 
year, and again in age, than it was in the intermediate 
period. The gold-coloured hair was, however, of 
course conspicuous in the child portraits, although 
there it is seen in conjunction with the decided chin 
and heavy brow, fined away by the Pre-Raphaelites. 

In this same period the subject of these pictures 
took up again the Tennyson " Idylls," illustrated by 
her drawings after the volume had been given to her 
in 1859, and wrote some laudation, from which, though 
still a Tennysonian, she would have recoiled in later 
days. It is not for me to decide between her imma- 
ture contrast, as it would afterwards have appeared 
to her, of Tennyson's "Idylls" with "la Morte 
d'Arthur " and her later views as set forth in her 
"Book of Life." In 1863 she wrote that Tennyson's 
"Idylls of the King" had the spirit of Spanish 
romance rather than of the " Morte d'Arthur." In 
Spanish romance she thought that valour and gene- 
rosity were called forth for some object undeservedly 
troubled or wrongfully oppressed, while in the 
" Mort Artus " she seemed at that time to discern a 
simple delight in fighting for its own sake, no matter 
which side was wrong or right. She detected also 
"an absence of purity," which was "not general," she 
thought, "even in Northern romance, certainly not 
in Norwegian or Icelandic," and the teaching that 
treachery and deceit were not wrong unless the body 
were injured by them — in other words, she preferred 
Tennyson. Later she had a very different view of 
the teaching, at least of Malory's romance, and there 
will be found towards the close of her " Book of Life " 
the nobler conception that she ultimately formed of 



26 MEMOIR 

a legend which all along was one of her choice 
companions. 

The summer journeys, among those taken with 
Mark Pattison, which had the most abiding result 
upon her subsequent work, were two long visits to 
Vienna; although she, perhaps, enjoyed more fully at 
the time the greater freedom of travel in Bohemia and 
in Hungary. Her work at Vienna was abundant, 
especially at the Albertina, to which, oddly enough, 
she was directed, on the occasion of her first visit, by 
the famous Archduke Albrecht himself. Armed with 
the proper letters, she had promised to present herself 
to the curators at a given hour, and, not being able to 
find the way, walked straight up to three well-dressed 
and kindly-looking gentlemen who had stopped to 
talk together in the street. The one to whom she 
spoke smiled benevolently,"and replied, " The fact is 
that I am going there myself if you will walk with 
us," and her astonishment was unbounded when the 
sentries, as they passed, presented arms. 

The mass of notes taken by Mrs. Pattison in the 
rich museums of the Austrian capital show a desire to 
embrace, by hard study, a complete view of the whole 
field of art and art-history. Her subsequent specializa- 
tion for a time in French art was probably caused by 
the fact that for work in that field there seemed a 
sufficiently large interested public. She naturally 
wished to find by publication additional income, 
especially for the sake of personal independence, to 
the end, for example, of collecting a personal library 
of books. Remembering her own early efforts, she 
was ever anxious to help young girls to a start in 
useful life. One of her letters to such a beginner, 
which has been put into my hands, deals, a quarter 
of a century later, with the Rector of Lincoln's advice 
on her own work for publication, given about 1863. 
" It was put before me that if I wished to command 



FRENCH ART STUDIES 27 

respect I must make myself tJie authority on some 
one subject which interested me. I was told, and 
it was good counsel, not to take hack-work, and to 
reject even well-paid things that would lead me off the 
track." Mrs. Pattison was also drawn to French art 
by early encouragement, in the first instance, by the 
Germans who had worked upon French art-history; 
but she never intended to give up her hold upon 
classical art, and, except when actually absorbed 
in writing for publication upon the arts of France, she 
never did so. When, ultimately, she became known 
to the French art world as one of the most serious 
of students, the praise which she most valued was 
that of the best-trained intellects of France for the 
completeness or " universality " of her art-know- 
ledge. 

The subjects upon which she wrote largely in her 
early days were in the main philosophical; as, for 
example, in the Saturday Rcvieiv, in articles " On the 
Imagination," on " Mind and Matter," and on Voltaire ; 
but she was also writing in the same period on 
" Religious Art." For a time she did a large portion 
of the notes on "Contemporary Literature" for the 
Westminster Review, and these were mainly upon art ; 
but in the Saturday Review her contributions con- 
tinued to be more general. It was not till 1869 that 
she began to think any of her articles worth keeping. 
The early ones are marked by evidence of great 
breadth of study and of knowledge, and by unwilling- 
ness, almost Benthamite in its obstinacy, to take any- 
thing for granted. But to real Authority there was 
through life, as has been shown, a most disciplined 
obedience. We are apt to think of hypnotism as more 
modern than the times of which I write ; but it was 
one of the subjects discussed by Mrs. Pattison in 
the Saiuj'day Reviezv during the later sixties, and 
discussed in a fashion which showed a strong turn 



28 MEMOIR 

towards philosophical study. The dominant interest 
soon came to the front, however, in a series of 
reviews of German books developing theories of 
aesthetics. She then settled down to regular art 
reviewing, both in the Saturday Review and in the 
Portfolio, while in 1869 she became the principal 
writer on art of the Academy. 

Among the theories which Mrs. Pattison developed 
in her reviews of art books was one treated in the 
Saturday Reviezv of August 22, 1868, in which she 
explained, with the utmost politeness towards her 
author (who was an Oxford man, and whose book had 
been published by the Delegates of the Clarendon 
Press), how " an author cannot be lively and amusing " 
when treating of the object of his life's labours; "he 
is over-burdened by the very fulness of his know- 
ledge." The article is one of the most characteristic 
which ever came from her pen. In it she attacked 
those who claimed to direct popular art education, for 
thinking exclusivel}^ of drawing and painting, while 
they forgot engraving, sculpture, and architecture. 
Sound works upon these subjects could not, she 
thought, be rendered fit for the general reader. The 
evidence of her friend Watts, before the Royal 
Academy Commission, had been misapprehended. 
Watts, she wrote, desired the refinement of the 
aesthetic perception. " In the kingdom of art," she 
thought, "imagination is not the handmaid, but the 
mistress of the understanding." She insisted on the 
doctrine known as " art for its own sake," and 
objected to the attempt to utilize the artist as a 
teacher, and, by forcing him to dwell on the moral 
influence of his subject, to make him suffer loss of 
the poetic elements and of inspiration. "The story 
is to the artist as the legend to the poet " : he lets 
" the dead past suck out the life of his own soul, until 
it stands before him a new creation." 



WALTER PATER 29 

Although by this time the paths of the Pre-Raphael- 
ites and of Ruskin had diverged, the article shows 
the influence of both schools, and ability to combine 
their teaching. Mrs. Pattison evidently drew from 
Ruskin's lectures and conversation her fear that 
pupils would be so trained as to carry "from their 
study of the school of Giotto the characteristic defects 
rather than the characteristic excellences — weak draw- 
ing and constrained action, instead of delicacy of 
sentiment and purity of tone. . . . The last word of 
the past should be the first word of the present; its 
goal should be our starting-point." The article shows 
the result of profound study of the frescoes of "the 
Carmine " in Florence, and of the work of Fra 
Angelico. 

The knowledge of all forms of art-history and art- 
philosophy displayed in Mrs. Pattison's surveys of 
contemporary literature in the Wcsfininster Review, 
which was at that time a Quarterly taking a line of its 
own as an organ of philosophic thought, caused much 
inquiry to be made as to the person of the writer of 
these articles, which were usually anonymous. 

Of her signed reviews one of the most severe 
was that of Pater's "Studies in the History of the 
Renaissance," in which she thought that the weak- 
ness of the historical element destroyed all possibility 
of valuable work. Some years afterwards, I find in 
one of her letters to an intimate friend, " Pater came 
and sat with me till dinner-time. We had been talk- 
ing before that on the exclusive cultivation of the 
memory in modern teaching as tending to destroy the 
power of thought, by sacrificing the attitude of medi- 
tation to that of perpetual apprehension. When the 
others left we went on talking of the same matter, 
but on different lines. Thence we came to how it 
might be possible, under present conditions of belief, 
to bring people up not as beasts, but as men, by the 



30 MEMOIR 

endeavour to train feeling and impart sentiments, as 
well as information. He looks for an accession of 
strength to the Roman Catholic Church, and thinks 
that if it would abandon its folly in political and 
social intrigue, and take up the attitude of a purely 
spiritual power, it would be, if not the best thing 
that could happen, at any rate better than the selfish 
vulgarity of the finite aims and ends which stand in 
place of an ideal in most lives now. He has changed 
a great deal, as I should think, for the better, and is 
a stronger man." 

Later again in life Mrs. Pattison became one of the 
greatest admirers of Pater's writings in other fields, 
and he of hers, as the pages of gift books which 
passed between them reveal. In his Renaissance, 
however, she showed that Pater fell short, through 
absence of scientific method and want of real know- 
ledge of the times of which the art of the Renaissance 
was an outcome. Pater, she thought, wrote of the 
Renaissance as if it was an " air-plant, independent of 
the ordinary sources of nourishment ... a senti- 
mental revolution having no relation to the conditions 
of the actual world." While praising his delicacy of 
touch in matters of sentiment, she thought that he 
failed to find "the expression of vital changes in 
human society " which made the sentiment pregnant 
with meaning. " We miss the sense of the con- 
nection between art and literature and the other 
forms of life of which they are the outward expres- 
sion, and feel as if we were wandering in a world of 
unsubstantial dreams." While denying the writer's 
intimate possession of his subject, she admitted the 
charm of his genius and the beauty of his style, and 
showed that, with a marvellous power of discrimin- 
ating delicate differences of sentiment, he could match 
the shades by words " in the choice of which he is 
often so brilliantly accurate that they gleam upon the 



CARICATURISTS 31 

paper with the radiance of jewels." It was perhaps in 
penance for this article, though she did not repent its 
doctrine, that, after Pater'sdeath, she bound the copy of 
his Renaissance, which he had presented to her, more 
beautifully than any other volume in her collection, and 
reverently placed within it a portrait of the author. 

In other articles upon very different branches of 
art, Mrs. Pattison discussed caricature, both of the 
professional caricaturist, such as Gillray, and of the 
artist in whom caricature was only occasional ; and 
showed how the professional could avoid that male- 
volence into which the amateur caricaturist, who was 
only a great artist, was sure to fall. In later life Lady 
Dilke became an admirer of Gavarni, as one of the 
first of caricaturists, who was also a great draughts- 
man. Her own executive power in the same sphere 
is unknown, even to the majority of her friends; as 
her caricatures were, with one exception, burnt after 
they had been laughed over, for fear " the male- 
volence " of the non-professional should be apparent. 
Once when we were in Paris, and had seen Sarah 
Bernhardt in a male part, Lady Dilke could not sleep 
until she had disposed of her impressions and dis- 
pelled nightmare by a sketch. It, however, survived 
till the next morning, when a friend, who came to 
lunch, captured it by main strength and carried it off 
in triumph to hand to the victim. 

Mrs. Pattison's health broke down in the winter of 
1867-8, as it did again in the winter of 1869-70. In 
a letter, dated February 19, 1868, she writes from 
" Iffley ... I am staying with mother. . . . About 
May 5 I go to the Rawlinsons at Chipping Norton, as 
it is still considered that for some months I am better 
out of Oxford and the cares and occupations it entails 
on me. ... I am still a nervous invalid . . . cannot 
suffer much external distraction. A stranger or 
acquaintance is torture to me, and if I force myself to 



32 MEMOIR 

meet the terror, the reaction is serious in its result on 
sleep." To all appearance she completely recovered 
from these attacks, and she was able, in the first part 
of the winter of 1869-70, to nurse her husband. She 
writes on January 11, 1870, from Lincoln College, 
saying that the Rector was very ill, and that after 
being up all night with him for two nights, she had 
sent for a professional nurse, and was going to take 
only the day nursing in the future, as she was 
breaking-down again. 

It was after these two serious illnesses that Mrs. 
Pattison did the most work for the Academy and 
first began to write much with signature. In 1870 she 
wrote a considerable number of important reviews, in 
addition to her current work, and dealt, among other 
subjects, with German art-philosophy, with Ruskin's 
Oxford lectures, and with Raphael, taking part as well 
in a Holbein controversy. She also reviewed "Nos 
Fils," a book by Michelet on general education. Re- 
viewing Ruskin in a signed article was a formidable 
undertaking. Fourteen years before the date in 1870 
on which the article appeared, he had been the first 
patron of her studies and designs. Until seven 
years before the criticism, Ruskin had still been the 
director of a portion of her work. She had, how- 
ever, written to one of the six artist members of the 
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, her friend Mr. F. G. 
Stephens,* that she had resented, in 1859, Ruskin's 
cruelty to Mulready. " Ruskin," her correspondent 
answered, "never erred more deeply than about 
Mulready." Mrs. Pattison's article was, of course, 

* As I have made several allusions to the P. R. B., it may be well 
to state that the other artist members were Mr. Holman Hunt, 
Millais, D. G. Rossetti, Woolner, and James Collinson. The seventh 
member was Mr. W. M. Rossetti. W. B. Scott and C. A. Collins, 
a friend of Miss Strong from her childhood, had been closely con- 
nected wiih the Brotherhood, although they were not members. 



DIVERGENCE FROM RUSKIN 33 

appreciative in a high degree ; but it contained sharp 
criticism upon many leading heads. Combating 
Ruskin's doctrines as to art and religious belief, she 
wrote, " Art is neither religious nor irreligious, moral 
nor immoral, useful nor useless : if she is interpreted 
in an}'' one of these senses by the beholder, has she to 
bear the blame?" Mrs. Pattison's crime was greater 
than mere criticism, couched, as this was, in respectful 
language : she showed a slight tendency to make fun 
of her great teacher, and declaring that his theory 
that the poor must be well off and sanitary laws be 
enforced before the arts could flourish, was not 
susceptible of proof, she expressed a doubt whether 
the " social -science -association -Arcadia" proposed 
would be so favourable as Ruskin thought to the 
production of fine art. On the contrary, she declared 
(referring doubtless to the Renaissance) that it is at 
"moments of explosion" that art "catches its most 
fervid glow of human beauty." The last words of 
the article formed a protest against being led by the 
charm of eloquence, or the infection of zeal, on to 
unsafe ground. It was a good many years before 
Ruskin forgave the emancipated disciple ; but he 
ended by completely forgiving her. 

A review of Herman Grimm has a pathetic interest, 
inasmuch as it opened with a statement of the two 
great difficulties with which, throughout the art-studies 
of her life, Lady Dilke found herself confronted. " The 
student of classic art finds himself in a deserted ruin ; " 
the student of modern art, on the other hand, is em- 
barrassed by the abundance of materials : letters, state 
documents, and biographies exist in vast number. In 
the one case the student is on the "shifting sands of 
hypothesis;" in the other case he has before him "a 
mass of materials which no one has yet attempted to 
bring into shape and order." She was grateful to 
Grimm for contributing, at least in spirit, " something 

F 



34 MEMOIR 

towards the commencement of the herculean task." It 
was this "herculean task" which she herself attempted, 
as regards French art, and in which perhaps, more 
than in any other effort, she wore out her strength. 

In 1870 Mrs. Pattison had commenced her articles on 
Annual Exhibitions, and in 1872 she reviewed, for the 
Academy, the exhibition of the Royal Academy. The 
article was signed, and although it dealt "faithfully" 
with the contributions of another of her teachers, 
G. F. Watts, it did not prevent that kindest of her 
friends from accepting, as did also Pater, without 
the irritability of Ruskin, a criticism which was obvi- 
ously honest and informed. There is no falling off 
in the cordiality of the letters from Little Holland 
House, and their playful signature of "Signor" was 
never intermitted. Watts and Mrs. Pattison had both, 
before 1872, taken to the practice of the violin; but 
Watts was kicked by a horse in 1872, and as a result 
wrote, " My violin, alas ! is almost wholly neglected, 
and my progress is a backward one. You, I suppose, 
are now qualified to play in an orchestra." Her fiddling 
was, however, stopped for ever as a consequence of 
the increasing muscular pains from which she began 
to suffer in 1875. These finally disappeared after her 
attack of typhoid fever in 1885, but there was even 
then left a slight stiffness of joint. While it did not 
prevent her fencing and sculling, it was fatal to the 
delicacy of touch which the violin requires. 

It will not be possible to give much of the corre- 
spondence which the subject of this memoir, from 
1870 up to her death, carried on with great art 
authorities abroad. The correspondence in German 
with Herman Grimm at Berlin ; in Italian with Berto- 
lotti, the State Archivist at Rome ; that in French 
with M. de Pulszky at Pesth ; and, above all, that in 
German with Thausing, at the Albertina of Vienna, 
extended over many years, and dealt with many 



FRENCH CORRESPONDENCE 35 

questions. These were the letters which alone she 
cared to keep and to look over from time to time, 
and the immense development of her foreign corre- 
spondence, in connection with her first book on the 
Renaissance, renders it of much bulk. To her, in 
what would have been, had she lived, the work of 
1906— the popularization of her first book on the Re- 
naissance — the letters would have been of the highest 
value, owing to the suggestiveness of the long essays 
which had been sent her by her eminent friends 
abroad ; but they are now to be named only, rather 
than to be given. One quotation shall I allow myself 
from her own letters in this correspondence. It bears 
no name, but was no doubt to M. Burty, the French 
art-critic. 

"Draguignan, 8 Mars 1879. 

" Monsieur, 

" Vous ne savez, done, pas que notre pauvre 
ami M. Appleton est mort ! 11 etait deja malade il y 
a un an, et le journal qui etait sa creation se trouvait 
alors, malheureusement, dans une crise qui menacait 
serieusement son existence. Notre pauvre ami etait 
force, s'il ne voulait pas voir perir son oeuvre, de 
lutter au moment meme ou il avait le plus besoin de 
repos. Mine par la fievre, epuise par une toux qui 
ne lui permettait pas de dormir, il deployait une ac- 
tivite et une energie qui encore une fois mettaient 
I'affaire sur pied, Mais le surcroit de travail, et cette 
exaltation nerveuse avec laquelle il poursuivait tou- 
jours ses projets, I'avaient completement brise. Quand, 
enfin, il a pu quitter I'Angleterre pour I'lLgypte, c'etait 
trop tard. II est mort a Luxor le i^' Fevrier. Je le 
regrette vivement ; c'est une vraie perte pour tous 
ceux qui ont la conscience de leur metier. 

"Je suis bien contente. Monsieur, que mon livre 
vous est tombe entre les mains. Permettez-moi 



36 MEMOIR 

d'appeler votre attention sur la Table Chronologique, 
qui, par la faute du relieur, se trouve enterree a la fin 
du second volume. Elle contient des renvois aux 
sources pour tous les faits cites dans le texte. J'ai 
soigneusement amasse tout ce que j'ai pu trouver 
pendant plusieurs annees, et je tiens beaucoup a 
insister sur ce qu'il y a de vraiment national dans 
I'art de cette epoque, en dehors de la fausse route 
Guverte par I'ecole de Fontainebleau. 

"Je travaille en ce moment sur Le Grand Steele^ 
et j'essaie de caracteriser la lutte de la Maitrise* 
expirante contre la tyrannie de I'Academie Royale. 

" Si vous voulez bien me signaler des lacunes a 
remplir, ou des corrections a faire dans le livre sur 
la Renaissance, je vous serai, Monsieur, vraiment 
reconnaissante. 

" Les reproductions laissent bien a desirer. Les 
ouvriers qu'on m'a oblige d'employer manipulent mal 
les procedes heliographiques. Je sais que vous 
appreciez la valeur d'Etienne Delaulne. II faut venir 
voir le livre que j'ai identifie a Oxford, et qui contient 
presque 6qo dessins de sa main. Si vous aviez quelques 
jours a nous donner pendant I'ete vous seriez recu 
a Lincoln College avec grand plaisir. 

"Agreez, Monsieur, je vous prie, mes meilleurs 
remerciments et compliments. 

"E. F. S. Pattison." 

The allusion in this letter is explained in two, 
written many years afterwards, which are in the 
Bibliotheque Nationale. On September 27, 1891, 
Lady Dilke wrote that Burty had many years pre- 
viously proposed that he and she should write 
together a monograph on £tienne Delaulne. For this 
intended book Mrs. Pattison catalogued the drawings, 
and names the fact that after Burty's death she had 
* See " Art in the Modern State," by Lady Dilke. 



EUGENE MUNTZ 37 

given the catalogue to the Bibliotheque de TEcole 
des Beaux Arts. In 1894 this project was taken up 
again by Eugene Miintz, who had in his possession 
the work which Burty had done towards the joint 
book. 

One of the most learned of the foreign correspon- 
dents of my wife, upon art questions, was Miintz, head 
of the Ecole des Beaux Arts. More than a hundred 
and fifty of her letters to him are preserved in 
the manuscript department at the Bibliotheque 
Nationale, the correspondence extending over a 
period of twenty-three years. To judge from one 
of Mrs. Pattison's letters, dated from Oxford in 1879, 
Muntz seems to have been introduced to her by 
letters both from Mr. Neubauer and from Renan, 
and had offered to translate into French her first 
book. It is a curious fact that joint work, proposed 
to Mrs. Pattison at various times by Muntz, Burty, Sir 
Charles Newton, and others, never c^me to anything; 
Mrs. Pattison having apparently given general assent, 
but not found herself tempted at the last moment to 
undertake the difficulties of collaboration. The cor- 
respondence with Miintz contains man}^ joint letters 
from the Pattisons between 1879 and 1884. Muntz, 
like others of her foreign friends, had come to visit 
the Rector of Lincoln and Mrs. Pattison at Oxford. 
An intimacy, dating from his stay at the Rector's 
Lodgings in 1880, and their joint visit to him in Paris 
in the winter of 1882-3, continued up to Miintz's 
death. Her letters to him have come to me by the 
kindness of his brother, also a member of the Institute, 
though famous in the field of science, not of art. 

A long and full correspondence with Robert 
Browning, which had begun before 1867, became 
most active in 1872. In a New Year's letter, condol- 
ing with Mrs. Pattison on having been too ill to start 
for Palermo, he wrote, " Last week, a prize-show 



38 MEMOIR 

American lady — oil-cake fed — observed to me, 'Wal, 
I never! Here's Mr. So-and-so been calling me a 
colibri, a humming-bird, fancy ! ' whereto I, as in duty 
bound, replied, ' Instead of Bird-of-Paradise, as / 
should have done ' — and was rewarded with an ' Oh, 
my ! ' which grinned from ear to ear, no inconsiderable 
distance. 'Yet was not this knight foresworn.' As 
for news, I have none. We are all reading the ' Life 
of Dickens' and admiring his sensitiveness at having 
brushed shoes and trimmed gallipots in his early days, 
when — did he see with the eyes of certain of his sagest 
friends — it was the best education imaginable for the 
like of him. Shall I versify ? 

" In Dickens, sure, philosophy was lacking, 
Since of calamities he counts the crowning, 
That, young, he had too much to do with Blacking : 

Old, he had not enough to do with B g. 

R. B." 

In a letter of March 6, 1872, in reply to one from 
Mrs. Pattison, in which she reproached him for having 
in his writings turned against the violet and taken up 
with new flowers. Browning wrote, " Yes, I prefer the 
Japanese lil}^ to all the flowers in the world ; for 
beauty, for odour, for all a flower can possess ; though 
I may have liked violets well enough in my time : . . . 
I have such a Japanese lily in my room, with me, at 
present, that the poor violets you glorify have no 
chance ! " Later in March, he wrote, giving full news 
of his son, and saying of himself, " I work in the morn- 
ings and am just at the end of my lily-perfumed 
performance." He again asserted his preference over 
all other things, except his son, "for one leaf of the 
lily now before me. . . . Do you ever get the American 
Atlantic Monthly at Oxford ? There is a funny parod}', 
in the January number, of my things — four parodies 
of them, indeed, which might amuse you ; an article 
called 'The Echo Club ' — I should surmise by Lowell." 



BROWNING AND GEORGE ELIOT 39 

In the following year Browning was at work on 
his version of that rather commonplace "tragedy," 
in Normandy, the suicide of M. Mellerio, the well- 
known jeweller of the Rue de la Paix. The poem 
was composed in "Red Cotton Nightcap Country" 
itself, and Browning wrote frequently about it, and 
of Calvados. There is often in his letters an after- 
thought of a desire to recommend a young painter 
to a powerful critic. When the critic was unable to 
do much, other critics are mentioned who had done 
more. There are constant references of detail to the 
poems. When Browning first began to write " Aris- 
tophanes' Apology," he notes, " My poem is pro- 
gressive, as it pleases the gods and don't please the 
public." A letter of 1874 deals with the loss of 
"seven intimates. ... It seems boastful to describe 
them as 'friends' — for who has so many?" Two are 
specified, and notes are exchanged as to my replies 
to letters of condolence, written to me by both of the 
correspondents. 

It was after Mrs. Pattison's second serious illness 
that George Eliot wrote, " It saddens me to think of 
the trouble and the bodily suffering that you have 
undergone. Can severe trouble ever be said to have 
quite passed away ? I think it alters all one's tissues, 
enlarging life perhaps by bringing new susceptibilities, 
but often dullmg even the wish for personal pleasure. 
It is a comfort to think that at last the precious Miss 
Eleanor Smith came to you." This is a deserved 
tribute to the constant tenderness of Mrs. Pattison's 
lifelong friend " Ellen," sister of Professor Henry 
Smith and hostess at "the Museum." George Eliot 
went on, " I am so-so. ' An ancient woman ' . . . ready 
with my laughter in spite of the sorrows that never 
pass." 

It was George Eliot who first sent Mrs. Pattison 
to Burne-Jones, for though she had long been intimate 



40 MEMOIR 

with the most whole-hearted of his admirers, Watts, 
and with many of his friends, she had not, in her early 
days, visited his studio. The result of her first day 
among his drawings was a considerable correspon- 
dence, to which there will be some allusion later. 
George Eliot's letters of 1872 give frec[uent news of 
Congreve and of Deutsch as common friends, contrast 
"your virtuous industry " with the writer's " idleness," 
and allude to the commencement of Mrs. Pattison's 
book on the Renaissance in France. In condolences 
with regard to work for publication George Eliot 
says, "All writing seems to me worse in the state of 
proof than in any other form. In manuscript one's 
own v/isdom is rather remarkable to one, but in proof 
it has the effect of one's private furniture repeated in 
the shop windows." 

In 1872 Prince Leopold became a frequent corre- 
sjDondent of Mrs. Pattison, whose services he asked 
with a view to some art purchases which he wished 
to make, and to commissions for young artists. The 
first letter of the young Prince has some political 
interest. 

" February 21, 1872. 

"Dear Mrs. Pattison, 

" I enclose herewith a copy of Tennyson's 
*" Epilogue ' to his ' Idylls ' which you said you would 
like to see ; I fear it is not a very clean copy, but I 
trust you will overlook its age and accept it. I think 
one of the best parts in it is that which alludes to our 
treatment of Canada, and to our spirit of money- 
making. I hope you will tell me what you think of 
it. . . . 

" Believe me, yours very sincerely, 

" Leopold." 

Later letters concerned the original suggestion of 
a commission from Prince Leopold to Legros for 



BURNE JONES AND WATTS 41 

"Death and the Woodcutter." Mrs. Pattison had 
been one of the first of critics to recognize Legros' 
talent. English painters were not forgotten, and two 
commissions were given at the same time to a painter 
she recommended, in reply to a question, as a "de- 
serving but struggling" man of talent. The last letter 
from the Duke of Albany which was kept, dated from 
Mentone more than ten years later, alluded to "the 
happy days, now so far off, at Oxford, of our duets 
and trios." 

About any use of Burne-Jones's letters there is 
the difficulty that they are undated, and that, while 
interesting matters concerning pictures and drawings 
are discussed, it is not certain to what particular 
examples of the painter reference is made. One — 
probably of a very early date — concerns a suggestion 
which had been made by Mrs. Pattison that Burne- 
Jones should exhibit in the Paris Salon, rather than 
in England, those of his pictures and drawings which 
appealed especially to artists. The beauty of the 
Burne-Jones drawings, and the constant description 
of him by Watts and others in whom the British 
public believed, as " our only painter of genius," a 
phrase invented by Watts, led, however, to the 
creation of a special public in London for Burne- 
Jones. The Grosvenor Gallery became the outward 
and visible sign of the triumph of a new school. 

A constant correspondent was Sir Charles New- 
ton ; but the best of the friendship between Mrs. 
Pattison and himself lay in their hours together at 
the British Museum. Before she took up her work 
upon the Renaissance, and, as regards more than half 
her working time, "specialized," much against her 
will, on the arts of France, she had intended to 
publish a work on classical art. A letter of February, 
1873, from Rome, discusses the nature of a proposed 
handbook to classical art, in which Sir Charles 

G 



42 MEMOIR 

Newton seemed to wish she should co-operate with 
him. He told her, however, of a new German work 
on Greek painting, intended to cover a portion of the 
ground — not the portion (architecture, sculpture, and 
medals) most attractive to herself Sir Charles 
Newton, who was leaving Rome for Ephesus, de- 
scribed the treasures of the Castellani collection. 
He was recommending the purchase to the trustees 
of the British Museum and to the Government, and 
sounded a note of alarm as to the enterprise of Berlin, 
of which we have lived to recognize the force. 

Boehm, too, was a frequent correspondent. In 
1873 the sculptor applied to Mrs. Pattison for facts 
unknown to him as to accurate sculptural costume, 
and wrote again to thank her for the labour she had 
bestowed on constructing an exhaustive survey of 
sources from which his questions could be answered. 
From the Boehm correspondence we know that, as a 
result of her second severe illness, and as a warning 
of the worse attack which was to follow in 1875, Mrs. 
Pattison had lost the use of her right hand by a 
stiffening of the wrist, and had learnt to write well, 
and to sketch in pen and ink sufficiently for the pur- 
poses of her work, with the left hand. 

The autumn of 1873 began for Mrs. Pattison with 
her appointment, at a salary, as art editor of the 
Academy. She was to give up her regular work for 
the Westminster Review, but was not compelled to 
cease to write elsewhere. She was to receive every 
art book or periodical sent to the Academy, and was 
to have control over the whole department, without 
the burden of the picture-gallery toil. The editor 
wrote, "This I think, as things are, a good offer, or 
not a bad one." It was accepted, and for some years 
her work was mainly destined for the Academy or for 
her books. She found time, however, to undertake a 
great number of short articles for the " Encyclopaedia 



WOMAN'S WORK 43 

Britannica," and after the partial recovery of her 
health five years later to take, in addition, other 
regular and important work. 

At the time of the death of Lady Dilke, it was 
noticed that there were two main branches in the 
labours of her life. Up to the present point her art 
work, in the widest sense, had been predominant. 
The other chief demand upon her time was called for 
by an interest in the life of working women, which 
it was sometimes incorrectly assumed had only fol- 
lowed her second marriage. In the opening numbers 
of the organ of the Women's Protective and Provident 
League, founded by Mrs. (Emma) Paterson, a working 
woman, it is recorded that Mrs. Mark Pattison was, 
from the earliest days, a member of the Council of 
the League, and had, " from the first, afforded most 
active and earnest help." She always felt and ex- 
pressed the duty of what she called " public service," 
and held that it was damaging, even to the individual, 
to lead a purely individual life, without setting aside 
time and thought for objects directly concerned 
with the industrial life of others. To use her own 
words, " It is a part of the work which this century 
calls on us— on all those who know the value of 
things spiritual — to perform. One has to help the 
many to feel the connection of their practical interests 
with great ideas. The work is so immense, and so 
little can be done in a lifetime, that one ceases to feel 
hurry." Mrs. Nettleship writes : " In this matter 
she had, far more than has been generally supposed, 
the sympathy, and, indeed, the most active assistance 
of the Rector of Lincoln." This was so, and I am 
even disposed to think that it was originally the 
influence of Mark Pattison's diatribes^on the useless- 
ness of mere monasticism which turned his wife 
from speculative theology to more human forms of 
devotion. 



44 MEMOIR 

In the first days of her connection with the 
League, she shared, as did the earlier "feminists," 
a view which she afterwards came to think a heres}^ 
namely, that women workers might be put at a dis- 
advantage by special protective legislation. But in the 
seventies, as in the nineties, she taught the necessity 
for women workers to ally themselves with the men 
organized in unions, and favoured stringent factory 
legislation and legislative shortening of hours for 
both sexes. 

Mrs, Pattison's labour work was, in its early 
Oxford days, a phase of her general desire to be 
useful to young women. As has been seen in a 
quotation from one of her letters, and will be seen 
again later in this memoir, she showed throughout 
life a painstaking care towards all girls, of whatever 
class, with whom she was brought into contact, it 
being, she thought, one of the strongest claims upon 
her to see that they were introduced to the life best 
suited to their circumstances and capacity. 

Early in June, 1875, Mrs. Pattison was attacked 
by gout in the hand, which rapidly developed into 
arthritis, and she was threatened with complete 
stiffening of all the joints. In August she was de- 
spatched to Wildbad in the Black Forest, where a 
severe course checked the evil. A late autumn season 
at Aix-les-Bains, and residence in the sheltered part 
of Nice, away from the sea, for a winter, placed her 
out of danger, though for some years afterwards 
her health was the cause of deep anxiety to her 
friends, her hard work, nevertheless, continuing. The 
contrast in her appearance between the photographs 
taken just before the attack of June, 1875, and those 
taken for many years afterwards, is remarkable, and 
she never entirely lost during the remainder of her 
life, except at moments when the face was brightened 
by a smile, the anxious look which came upon it 




WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE 45 

before the autumn of 1875. By Christmas she had 

regained her spirits. She writes from Nice to a 

sister (Mrs. Tuckwell), December 

28, " I shall be very glad to see 

Mrs. Kinglake," but she explains 

that she is in a poor villa, of which 

hers is "the shabbiest and smallest 

apartment." Giving a thumb-nail 

sketch of the handmaid in question, 

she praises "the excellent bonne a 

tout fairer Her sitting-room is, " as 

Henry Smith remarked yesterday, 

beautifully furnished with the sun. The ceiling mostly 

lies on the floor . . . but we have the sun most days, 

and then I'm allowed out till sunset, which is a great 

boon." Among her other visitors at Nice were Prince 

Leopold, and Frank Dicey the painter, for whom she 

had, as for his mother, a deep affection. 

I was in frequent correspondence with Mrs. Patti- 
son during 1875 and 1876, and we were "fighting" 
most of the time, for it so happened that our views 
were opposed upon three kinds of parliamentary 
action taken by me in those years. On " reform of 
the Royal Academy" I was an extreme Radical, 
who thought her Toryfied by her surroundings. In 
University Reform, however, the subject in two 
sessions of important Government Bills, destined to 
become in combination a single Act, the positions 
were reversed, Mrs. Pattison being favourable to 
endowment of research, while I, with far less com- 
petence, was an advocate for the college as against 
the university. Finally we fell out over the women's 
franchise question, both of us, however, being strong 
advocates of the political enfranchisement of women. 
To it I had, indeed, contributed by proposing, in 
1869, the restoration to women of the municipal fran- 
chise (of which they had only finally been deprived 



46 MEMOIR 

by the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835), and by 
seconding the usual Women's Franchise Bill in 1870, 
when Mr. Jacob Bright and I succeeded in carrying 
the second reading. On this occasion I had told 
the promoters of the measure that I was not really 
favourable to " the limited Bill," but only, if more 
than a mere demonstration were intended, to adult 
suffrage, such as has subsequently been carried in 
New Zealand and in Australia. Mrs. Pattison was 
the chief mover for a time in the Oxford branch of 
the older Women's Suffrage Society. She sat next 
to Mrs. Grote at the first public meeting held in 
London on behalf of the cause, and is so portrayed in 
the illustrated papers of the time. She argued with 
me by letter as fiercely upon this question as upon 
the others that I have named, believing, as she then 
did, that the limited suffrage could be carried, and 
would be valuable. On this one, however, of the 
disputed topics, I was able to convert her, and she 
wrote much later an article intended to show that it 
could not be expected that the limited form of 
women's suffrage would be adopted in this country, 
any more than it had been in any other, and that 
women should work rather for complete enfran- 
chisement. While we fought over public ques- 
tions, I was more able to accept her views on art. 
She had been the cause of royal commissions being 
given to Legros and to Dalou, among foreign artists 
who had come to England, and to Britten among 
young English painters of talent, and I too, urged 
by her, gave commissions to the same three men. 
That by me to Legros produced the only oil por- 
trait that exists of Gambetta from the life, which is in 
my possession till it goes to the French National 
Collection. 

Another subject on which I had a controversy, in 
1877, with Mrs. Pattison, concerned " L'Assommoir." 



THE NATURALIST SCHOOL 47 

We agreed in admiring some of Zola's earlier work 
as we did afterwards in praising "Germinal." As to 
the volume, however, that caused, it was said, Mr. 
Swinburne's withdrawal of his name from the list of 
contributors to the review in which it appeared, on 
the ground that the book made him "sick in a 
corner," we differed absolutely, she rather attacking 
the form and language of the criticisms upon the 
work, than defending pages she had not carefully 
perused. Mrs. Pattison thought that it was childish to 
attempt to read such books without the guidance of 
a fixed mental purpose to try to see how Zola had 
realized or wrought out the heart of the subject 
which he had chosen. She said that if she had been 
" reviewing Keats " on the first appearance of some 
of his poems, she might have put him somewhat low 
in the scale as "unwholesome reading," but to say 
this would be a personal impression or "unqualified 
predilection of the writer." She should feel herself 
bound to take into consideration the poet's intention, 
and its successful rendering; his knowledge of and 
genius for his art. To her, some of what were sup- 
posed to be the finest of the poems of Keats and 
Shelley seemed to occupy much the same position 
that some of Zola's books held with me ; and the 
fact that on the one side we found "goddesses and 
peacock's feathers," and on the other side " gin in 
courts," made "little difference." She threw over 
Zola's own defence of his books, because a delinea- 
tion of manners cannot properly be defended as a 
social or " political polemic." But she thought that 
we ought to have regard to Zola's choice of subject 
and his treatment of it, and that whatever might be 
said about his treatment, his aim appeared to have 
been to give an accurate " picture of the dangerous 
classes," and that he seemed in this to have suc- 
ceeded; that the choice was open to criticism on the 



48 MEMOIR 

question of the degree in which it was susceptible 
of finished literary treatment, and that my criticism 
in effect was only this, " Such people are horrid. 
I do not wish to be told of them. Take them away;" 
and was "no more criticism" than was "the resent- 
ment of a child at the sight of a black doll." 

There is nothing that gives a clearer impression 
of personality and opinions than such a controversy; 
an excuse, perhaps, for naming one other. On 
artistic copyright Mrs. Pattison took, not unnaturally, 
a view more extreme than that of the politicians. 
She thought the artists clearly in the right ; " their 
works are exposed to the risk of misrepresentation 
in reproduction, by which their reputation may be 
seriously damaged. Even authors are far less liable 
to such injury by such means. I remember but one 
single case, that of Racine, whose enemies brought 
out a falsified ' Phedre.' To bring about this injury 
it needed a personal hate, ready to make pecuniary 
sacrifice in order to wreak itself; whereas, if the 
work of an artist is of interest, it is a paying thing to 
reproduce it, anyhow. Any one can judge of the 
correctness of the text of a modern author ; but how 
many people can tell whether a print or chromo- 
lithograph correctly represents the qualities of a 
painting on which a man had staked his name and 
credit ? By literary piracy a man may suffer in 
purse, but rarely, if ever, in reputation : by artistic 
piracy a man is nearly certain to suffer in reputation 
as well as in purse." 

Mrs. Pattison had also her controversies with 
others. Browning continued to be one of the most 
constant of her correspondents during her illness of 
1875 and after her recovery. One of the letters deals 
with a mistake in a poem, which in the end he admitted 
that he had made. He went on to complain of the 
reviewers for the expression of a belief that his 



BROWNING AND GEORGE ELIOT 49 

classical plays were borrowed from Jowett's con- 
versation, where they were not directly stolen from 
Euripides. Referring to an article in the World, 
Browning wrote, " I have never set eyes on the 
Master these four years about, not foot in Oxford 
these six; and suppose that Jowett's notions and 
mine are wide as the poles apart, if I had the chance 
of knowing them." In the following year Mrs. Patti- 
son, writing about Browning to me, said that in fact 
Browning had had a serious quarrel with Jowett. 
Browning showed great kindness in sending her full 
news of the art-world during her enforced winter 
absences, and took the pains to give her his own 
accounts, as did his sister hers, of the Winter Exhibi- 
tions of the Royal Academy. Just as in her Nice 
season Browning at first argued, and then admitted 
one error in a poem, so in her second winter abroad, 
spent at Grasse, he wrote to acknowledge another. 
Both the errors had been detected by her alone. To 
one of these letters Browning added a separate set of 
errata in other poems, and went out of his way to 
admit "strange faults of rhyme in the poem about the 
Jews — which are my own blundering — 1 do not know 
how : I wrote the thing while the earlier sheets were 
passing through the press, and did not read them 
a tete repose e." 

Another regular correspondent in the days of sick- 
ness was George Eliot. After the autumn at Wildbad 
and Aix, she wrote to Mrs. Pattison, " I am enough 
acquainted with bodily suffering to enter with fellow- 
feeling into your severe trial. ... I am determined 
to think of you as cheerfully as I can, being too much 
inclined to despond about my own doings to afford 
despondency about my friends. . . . But I feel that 
your long, wearisome endurance of pain which eats 
itself into every cranny of mind and body may seem 
to you to deserve the name of agony." George Eliot 

H 



50 MEMOIR 

named cases of persons with paralyzed limbs or 
destroyed sight — such as Augustin Thierry, the his- 
torian, who "made his life precious to himself and 
others, and was really an enjoying creature." 

The solitude in which, after the breakdown of her 
health in 1875, a part of each year had for some time 
been spent, was the subject of an interesting letter to 
Eugene Muntz, dated January 5, 1881, in which the 
effect of such a life on work is discussed. Mrs. 
Pattison summed up the loss and the gain with argu- 
ments which were repeated many years afterwards 
by Lady Dilke as to the life at Pyrford. In regard to 
the art work, she thought that the chief loss was the 
risk, in working alone, of spending time on things 
which conversation with fellow-workers in towns 
would show had been already done. But the great 
gain was that in solitude alone was there a chance 
for "les idees qui relient . . . through which alone 
one can become really master of one's work." 

In the summer between Nice and Grasse, George 
Eliot answers to Mrs. Pattison a letter from the 
Rector of Lincoln, in which he describes the number 
of letters which were waiting for his wife on her 
return to England. Both she and the Rector had 
mentioned the loving care which had been taken of 
the former at Wildbad and Aix and Nice, as afterwards 
at Grasse and at Draguignan, by " Madame " Moreau. 
This old Burgundian had been employed previously 
by several of Mrs. Pattison's friends, and had now 
proved so admirable a support and encouragement 
to her charge, that the relations between them grew 
to be those of deep affection. Moreau, who had been, 
about the time that Mrs. Pattison was born, in service 
with great families in the South of France ; afterwards, 
as femme de confiance, with the French dressmaker of 
the Imperial family at St. Petersburg, and then again 
a travelling maid, had her savings, and was somewhat 




■^ 






GEORGE ELIOT 51 

of a substantial person in all senses of the epithet. In 
each of Mark Pattison's letters to his wife during her 
absences abroad, he invariably sends a message to 
Madame Moreau. She attached herself deepl}'' to 
Mrs. Pattison, and even when, after our marriage, she 
saw less of her former charge, their relations by letter 
remained as close as they had been in the past. At 
Draguignan the little house where Mrs. Pattison 
spent some winter months of several years was 
Moreau's, and after our marriage Moreau continued 
to live there, letting to a priest the tiny rooms which 
Mrs. Pattison had occupied. Moreau's niece became 
Lady Dilke's maid for a long series of the last years 
of our married life, and she and I were together with 
her when my wife died. The death of Moreau in 
1904, at the age of eighty, was a heavy loss. 

George Eliot and Mark Pattison had been ex- 
changing notes as to the extraordinary accuracy of 
knowledge displayed, in the absence of all books of 
reference, by Mrs. Pattison in an article written at 
Nice, for the Academy, on Voltaire. It was followed 
indeed by a second, penned at Grasse. In the spring 
of 1877 George Eliot wrote, "Ah, how many nights 
and days you have had of such acute and disabling 
pain. . . . Ever since you came to see me with your 
white face and lips I have been haunted by the sense 
that the opportunity had been wanting to me of saying 
or doing anything that expressed how far I felt with 
you — felt, at least, as one who can only imperfectly 
imagine what she grieves for. But now your account 
of yourself is as cheerful as can be in one respect, I 
mean in the proof it gives that you have kept your 
mental energy. The loss of that is often the most 
dreadful part of a bodily suffering which is inter- 
mittent. As long as severe pain lasts I do not suppose 
anybody can care about such loss, but to get up from 
the rack and find one's self half imbecile, the chief 



52 MEMOIR 

sign of any intellect left being the consciousness that 
one's intellect has almost gone, is a horrible lot. . . . 
Let us be thankful that your mind is as vivacious as 
ever. . . . You know quite well how the world is 
going on here, the Grosvenor Gallery built . . . and 
everybody darkening counsel by words without know- 
ledge on the terrible Eastern question." George Eliot 
also described in this long gossiping letter her troubles 
about settling in a house, addressing her difficulties 
to "you who have a genius for getting all these 
things to your mind." The truth of this last state- 
ment will appeal to all who know how, throughout 
her housekeeping life, and especially at " Lincoln," at 
Headington, and at Pyrford, the subject of this memoir 
succeeded in creating perfect homes. 

In July, 1877, Mrs. Pattison, being in better health, 
came up from Lincoln College specially to attend, as 
the principal speaker, the annual meeting of the 
Women's Trade Union League, at that time known 
by an earlier name. This was, so far as I know, her 
first public speech, and, to judge from the descriptions 
of it given by those who were present, it made on the 
audience exactly the same impression which, up to 
the end of her life, her labour speeches invariably 
produced on hearers. In July, 1877, as in Trade 
Congress week in September, 1904, that which struck 
the listener was the clearness and directness of 
language with which strong conviction and persistent 
purpose were enforced. The tones of pathos, when 
there was allusion to the suffering of the poor, and 
especially to the lot of women, were there to touch 
the working people ; but the knowledge of the 
subject, the strength and the sanity behind, had an 
equal effect upon the more cultivated and the more 
hardened hearer. The most remarkable of the series 
of speeches which, in the course of many years, 
she delivered at the London annual meeting of the 



POLITICAL FRIENDS 53 

League, was that made three years later, when, with 
the support of William Morris, as well as that of 
Professor Bryce, she advocated a complete system 
of technical education for women, greatly in advance 
of its time. 

Mrs. Pattison had been corresponding with Mr. 
Chamberlain, for five months previous to the de- 
livery of the 1880 speech, upon the working of the 
art schools at Birmingham, and she had also been 
in communication with her friends at Vienna upon 
the training of young women. Ten years later she 
described her correspondence with Mr. Chamberlain, 
more fully, in an article in the Fortnighily Review, 
"Art Teaching and Technical Schools ' (February, 
1890); repeating doctrines laid down by her in the 
Pall Mall Gazette^ under the editorship of her old 
friend Mr. John Morley, in 1879. In her earlier 
speeches Mrs. Pattison had pointed out, that while the 
Women's Trade Union League had, at that time, "no 
rival" in the world, other nations had, and we had 
not, public professional schools for training women in 
industrial work. Professor Huxley had advocated 
technical education, and had produced action by the 
City guilds; but there had been no recognition of the 
just claim of working women to have their technical 
education provided on an equal footing. A branch of 
the League was established through the efforts of Mrs. 
Pattison in Oxford. An inaugural meeting was held 
at Lincoln College, and attended by the Rector, as 
well as by her friends Professor Nettleship and Dr. 
Percival, now Bishop of Hereford. The branch still 
exists, and rightly regards Mrs. Pattison, along with 
Mrs. (Emma) Paterson, as " founders." 

In 1878 Mrs. Pattison was elected a member of the 
Radical Club, which consisted of twenty Members of 
Parliament, among whom were, at that time, Mr. 
Chamberlain, Mr. Courtney, and Professor Pawcett, 



54 . MEMOIR 

and of twenty " non-Members," five of them being 
women, including Miss Helen Taylor. While, how- 
ever, some of those named here were constant 
attendants, Mrs. Pattison seldom exceeded the two 
attendances in the year at dinners of the Club which 
were necessary to maintain membership. It will be 
found that she was not pleased with the discussion 
the first time she was present at the Club. She 
never but once, according to the books, brought for- 
ward a subject for discussion, and that was a special 
subject of her own, " The conditions which should 
determine the wages of female labour." 

She was now busily at work on her first book, 
"The Renaissance of Art in France." As soon as 
this heavy task was off her hands, even before the 
actual appearance of the volumes, she began to toil 
at subjects of another class, treated with her usual 
thoroughness. The editor of the Annual Register had 
asked her to review a number of art books, and it was 
soon settled that, as she was much in France, and 
was continually visiting Italy, in connection with her 
work in art and archaeology, she should deal also with 
the politics and international position of those two 
countries. She writes from Draguignan to a literary 
_ and personal friend, one of her chief editors, " I am 
/ in the agonies of the Annual Register, but though, 
\ as you say, to a certain extent, it does not go with my 
other work, I think it is a good thing to have to master 
the Tunis question, and schemes of Army and Navy 
reform — down to minute points of the construction of 
battleships. All depends on whether one can keep 
these things in relation to the whole of life. One 
cannot write these chapters of modern history with- 
out trying to form one's own opinion on the questions 
of the day, and that inspires one with the wish to try 
at least to find the bond which must exist somewhere 
between the fine arts themselves and the current of 



ITALY 55 

national life. So it seems to me that even the little 
bit of work one tries to do one's self must gain in 
value." The same idea is expressed in a letter to 
Eugene Muntz of the end of 1881, of which I translate 
a passage. He had complained of her doing "other 
work." She replied with some admissions, and went 
on, " Yet I gain something. Ordinary life widens the 
horizon for men. Women are walled in behind social 
conventions. If they climb over, they lose more than 
they gain. It is therefore necessary to accept the 
situation as nature and society have made it, and to 
try to create for one's self a position from which on 
peut dominer ce qu'on ne peut pas franchir," 

The result of the interest shown by her in Italian 
politics during a visit to Rome in 1879 was that a 
close friendship sprang up between Mrs. Pattison and 
the Italian statesmen Bonghi and Sella, and that she 
had access for many years to interesting sources of 
information in connection with Italian affairs. She 
continued her regular work for the Annual Register 
from 1879 to 1884. There is a letter from George 
Eliot, dated May 29, 1879— a joint letter to the 
Rector of Lincoln and to Mrs. Pattison — alluding to 
the journey to Rome that led to the first acquaintance 
with Bonghi and Sella, and also to the considerable 
improvement in Mrs. Pattison's health. In the next 
visit to Rome George Eliot was more sorrowfully 
remembered. On the back of a letter from a lady who 
was a friend of the Mark Pattisons, and of George 
Eliot, describing the final traged}'' of the great novelist's 
life, Mrs. Pattison made some notes which cannot yet 
be published. 

Dr. Bode's new edition of " Burckhardt's Cicerone," 
which came out in 1879, was annotated by Mrs. Patti- 
son for her visit to Italy in that year ; but she divided 
her time at Rome, both in 1879 and 1881 — as her note- 
books show — between fine art and politics. She had, 



56 MEMOIR 

however, opportunities of combining the two. Bonghi 
and Minghetti took her to the Forum, and her notes 
of Minghetti's conversations as to the relations between 
the State and the Church, come between drawings of 
pictures in the Colonna and in the Doria galleries. 
" Minghetti said, ' So far from provisions for the sale of 
glebe lands being likely to be of a liberalizing tendenc}^ 
they will detach the priest even more completely from 
the social conditions of the day. Whenever the priests, 
as in Liguria, receive only pay from Government, they 
are Ultramontane; whereas in Piedmont, where they 
have lands to cultivate, they are, by that fact, linked 
to the existing order of things. The interests of the 
priest, as a farmer, are so far those of the people 
amongst whom he lives.'" 

It was Sella, the great financier, who, of all Italians, 
talked to Mrs. Pattison the most at Rome, although 
Bonghi became her chief correspondent. " Sella 
infinitely more satisfactory than either Minghetti or 
Bonghi. Minghetti too official, and Bonghi too facile, 
to be capable of doing the best sort of work. ... I 
used to suppose that practical politicians hated ideas ; 
but it seems to me here that their hatred of facts goes 
deeper still. One of the Minghetti set, talking in a 
spirit hostile to Roumanian independence, built an 
elaborate argument on the ' fact ' that the Roumans 
were incapable of learning or literature. ... I told 
him that if he would refer to the transactions of the 
archaeological societies of Vienna during the past year, 
he would find most respectful acknowledgment of the 
services rendered by those actively engaged on their 
national antiquities at Bucarest. ... I have no doubt 
that he will make his statement just as confidently on 
the next opportunity." On another occasion at Rome, 
in 1879, she noted of Sella, " It is many years since I 
have felt the ' personal influence ' of another sensibly 
as a help. . . . Sella, I suppose, looking to the facts 



ITALIAN STATESMEN 57 

of the last ten years, would be described by outsiders 
as an unsuccessful politician. If it is so, then that is 
a condemnation of modern political life in Italy." She 
went on to express a doubt as to whether the " temper 
in which philosophical consideration of social and 
political problems is alone possible ... is not a dis- 
qualification for dealing with practical questions." 
Mrs. Pattison thought also that, like practical politics, 
journalism ought, if possible, to be abandoned with 
growing age and knowledge, unless it was the sole 
career. " It harms those, even the most gifted, who 
continue in it after early life. They cannot honestly 
write the kind of thing required for their public if they 
are really striving to reach the highest level of thought 
and work possible to themselves." She considered that, 
in age, one should look forward to the day on which 
it might be possible to " resolve never to open a review 
or journal of any kind. When the lines of serious 
study are distinctly fixed, the attention is only frittered 
and disturbed by running over statements which con- 
tain perhaps, now and again, as if by accident, some 
suggestion — rarely of importance to one's own work. 
When once this class of expression has ceased to con- 
tain any information for one, it can only be of interest 
to the curiosity if one is occupied with the study of 
public opinion. If that is not one's work, it is best 
let alone, and the strength it might absorb reserved 
for a real purpose." 

In all her letters from Rome, Mrs. Pattison returned 
to considerations suggested by Sella, whose character 
made a deep impression on her. In a letter to myself, 
having relation to those University Bills on which we 
had differed, she wrote, " One of the manifestly absurd 
things said about him in Minghetti's set is that he 
does not know Latin. I found him steeped in classi- 
cal literature. ... In connection with this, I may tell 
you of his showing that he understood the University 



58 MEMOIR 

question, and its importance in relation to the future 
of a State. How unfortunate it was tliat my first 
introduction to the Radical Club should have been on 
the occasion of their discussion of a bill for the Uni- 
versities commission." 

For Bonghi, though she thought him inferior to 
Sella, Mrs. Pattison had a sincere respect. To another 
correspondent she wrote, " His library aroused my 
envy. One great division devoted to philology and 
classical literature ; a second to economy and admini- 
stration ; a third historical and political ; a fourth 
philosophical, and so on. He asked Moreau by what 
train we left, as he was coming to see me off." They 
had talked of everything and agreed on most things, 
even on Italian sculpture. Mrs. Pattison returned to 
Sella in all her letters : " You cannot put him into the 
same category as any of the others." He was a man 
who could " help others to grow, . . . quiet, simple, 
grave — perhaps unpliant. . . . Honesty of soul must 
loathe petty politicians with their atmosphere of 
personalities and corruption. I have been asking my- 
self since I have been here, ' Can an old country come 
to life again ? ' " She had found a happy augury in 
the patriotism of Sella, he having grown to be what 
he was in face of popular apathy. 

After her first meeting with Bonghi, Barnabei, the 
archaeologist, had asked her what she thought of the 
former. She replied that the excessive activity of his 
intelligence was turned in all directions without a 
corresponding effort of control. Bonghi's letters, and 
his subsequent visits to England, were nevertheless 
valued by Mrs. Pattison, and Lady Dilke had retained, 
until her death, a much larger number of Bonghi's 
letters than of those of most of her regular correspon- 
dents. Letters in French and Italian upon politics 
and upon art subjects have lost their interest ; and 
discussions upon Platonic dialogues would suit but a 




MRS. PATTISON'S DRAGUIONAN GARDKN. 



{To face p. 59. 



BONGHI 59 

small public. There is, perhaps, a permanent human 
interest in Bonghi's remark, following a not over- 
polite account of differences between Depretis and 
Cairoli, "You may believe me, for they are both of 
them m}^ political opponents and my personal friends." 

It so happens that politicians and public questions 
have been the theme of the pages of this Memoir 
which deal with the Roman visits, but it must be 
borne in mind that the subject of this Memoir was 
even more deeply interested in the romance, the 
art, and the history of the Italy of the past, with 
which she had been throughout her previous life 
familiar. 

As early as 1876 Mrs. Pattison had begun to write 
on Caldecott, and he, in addition to those previously 
named at Nice, was of the guests who at one or another 
time occupied the biichcr in Madame Moreau's garden 
at Draguignan, and tasted of the cookery of that 
wonderful old dame, who, with the assistance of a 
wild girl, now become middle-aged, was lady's-maid, 
housemaid, gardener, wine-maker, and cook, as well 
as landowner and proprietor. In a pilgrimage of 
December, 1904, I found that the present owner, 
who purchased the little villa from Madame Moreau 
when she left to spend her last years in Paris, has 
kept the old wood-house in the condition in which it 
was put when, early in Moreau's occupancy, it was 
turned into a spare bedroom, and the firewood rele- 
gated to another spot. In this plain, tile-floored, 
barn-like, but pretty room, grown over at that time 
with the thornless or "miraculous" roses of St. 
Francis — now no more there — Caldecott, alone of 
visitors, except one old French painter, made a long 
stay. He was very ill, and Madame Moreau "took a 
fancy to him and nursed him as if he had been her 
child." A correspondence between Mrs. Pattison and 
Caldecott followed, which lasted till his death, and in 



6o MEMOIR 

which the letters of both sides were illustrated. Not 
only did Lady Dilke write specially on Caldecott's 
work on more than one occasion, but she had so great 
a personal liking for him that, had she lived to publish 
a projected book of recollections of her art friends, 
for which she had prepared material, Caldecott would 
have occupied a prominent place. Her most complete 
writing upon this subject appeared in two numbers of 
the A 7^f Journal as late as 1895. 

Lady Dilke mentions, in her articles of May and 
July in that year, that she had known Caldecott when 
he was modelling under Dalou in 1872, and when he 
had been working as decorator in 1875. He had 
stayed with her at Grasse at Christmas, 1876, and had 
gone with her to see a group at Lorgues by Puget, the 
famous Provencal sculptor of the time of Louis XIV, 
In March, 1879, Mrs. Pattison and Moreau had taken 
Caldecott from Mentone to Rome, and after their 
return, his illness growing worse, she had seen him 
in Paris while she was working at her Salon article, 
and he at his " Babes in the Wood." Mrs. Pattison 
notes that he introduced himself into the pictures as 
the dying father, and Moreau as the old nurse. A good 
many of Caldecott's letters are quoted in her articles ; 
but there are many of interest which have not been 
mentioned. In an early one he notes playfully the 
pretended advice which he obtains by condensing one 
of Mrs, Pattison's letters to him ; that it was " one's 
duty" to arrive "at the last stage of exhaustion, in 
order to be able to put all one's force into one's 
work. Yet I think I am of too sanguine a tempera- 
ment to try it." 

Later letters are concerned with the details of 
his book-illustration. One of the most interesting 
contains a criticism on " Breton Folk," to which, in 
her second article on Caldecott, she gave his reply. 
The artist had asked Mrs. Pattison to criticize him 



RANDOLPH CALDECOTT 6i 

freely, with a view to improving his work. She 
wrote, December i, 1879 — 

" My dear Mr. Caldecott, 

" I have three times sat down with * Breton 
Folk,' and ' The Babes,' and ' The Mad Dog,' intending to 
write my 'impressions,' and each time, instead of their 
helping me to any correct statement of those already 
received, they have but persisted in making a great 
many more, and I have found myself so entertained 
and pleased and interested that I have spent all the 
hour, meant to be devoted to a letter, in selfish amuse- 
ment. I like to be told stories, and there is no one 
who has a greater gift that way than you. In this 
respect the * Babes ' and the ' Dog ' have an advantage 
oyer ' Breton Folk,' because they call forth that peculiar 
gift. The ' Babes ' harrow my feelings so painfully, 
that I cannot dwell upon the pages in which their pitiful 
story is recorded. I keep turning back to the happy 
days when they toddled and ran in the ' pleasaunce ' 
whilst father and mother sat wrapped in joy side by side 
under the tree. I am very, very sorry for 'The Dog,' 
but the coming event does not cast its black shadow 
over everything, and leaves me free to enjoy all the 
fun and fuss. The group of running girls is admirable. 
Power of drawing movement, you know, is another of 
your precious possessions, and this comes out in many 
pages of ' Breton Folk,' where there is no story to tell, 
but only flitting memories to record. I always think 
that I am a very bad critic, because it is so difficult to 
me always to find out why I enjoy, and most difficult 
when I enjoy most. I only know that it is with a 
wrench that I try to leave off from the passive recep- 
tion of pleasure, and to begin analyzing how the effects 
have been produced. A good many of the very 
slightest sketches — 'caps, etc' — in 'Breton Folk' 
didn't interest me, didn't seem to be more particularly 



62 MEMOIR 

'friend Caldecott' than any other one. I'll instance 
p. 72, not as the special example, because it's not 
more slight than p. 1 14, but I fancy that I feel the artist 
in p. 114, and I don't feel him in p. 72. I fancy (but 
please understand I am speaking most specially under 
correction, and I'm not one bit sure) that I am caught 
and delighted either by story (p. 107), by character 
(pp. 82, 151, 152), by arrangement (winnowing, St. 
Brieuc) ; or movement — Horse Fair at Le Folgoet ; 
and again p. 64, If I made a list of all that have given 
me great pleasure I should fill my letter with the 
numbers, but I intensely delight in childish character. 
I think the little ones in the cabbage plants perfectly 
charming. Page 68, too, is beautifully spaced, and I 
am inclined to think that in this volume, taken as a 
whole, you seem more able to put things where you 
would like to have them, and that your wider expe- 
rience has enabled you to find ways of doing what 
you want instead of being forced to have recourse to 
conventional ways, which are part of the common 
stock. This is evident, not only in the arrangement 
— there are some ' Hennebont girls ' coming up and 
turning round (p. 149) on the way to and from a well 
which struck me for their detached grouping — but 
also in the use of colour which it is so difficult to 
employ, and which obliges one to have recourse to 
endless fictions of the most embarrassing nature. 
Page 80, which I take at haphazard, shows these 
fictions put to an excellent use — made to help ; but in 
the big leaf opposite to p. 80 you seem to me not to 
have got what you might from them, or perhaps I 
should say they seem to have been too much for you 
still, when taken in conjunction with an interior effect 
of light and shade. I fancy that this is one of the 
points on which you might dwell now, but please see 
if some capable practical opinion is the same as that 
which I venture to offer. . . . Du Maurier's criticism 



RENAN 63 

may have been caused by work in which you were 
only ' observing,' not with the purpose of story. That 
must make a great difference as to emphasis on the 
t3''pe under treatment. 

" I was very sorry, too, you could not come to 
Oxford. The Rector of Lincoln is a great admirer of 
John Gilpin, and would have been delighted to see 
you. ' Friend Moreau,' and I too, join in regret that 
you can't come to us, nor we go to you. . . . 

" I am very well just now, thank you, and hope I 
may be back early next year in full force, and that I 
may find you at least able .to outwalk me, which, alas ! 
in Rome last spring was out of possibility. Let us 
hear from you whenever you are inclined, and believe 
me really and very cordially yours, 

" E. F. S. Pattison." 

One of Caldecott's letters from Mentone thanks 
her " for taking the trouble to really criticize ' Brace- 
bridge Hall ' illustrations. I will try to mend in the 
direction which you indicate. Few tell one in a 
practical way the exact points where amendment 
should begin." The chief charm of the letters lies 
in their illustrations ; * and in thumb-nail sketching 
Mrs. Pattison was not far behind Caldecott himself 

On her way back from Italy each year, Mrs. Pattison 
had to make her studies in Paris at the Salon for her 
annual art reviews for the Academy, which had 
begun in 1876. On her visit to Paris in 1880, she was 
welcomed with special interest by the art and literary 
world, on account of the appearance of her two 
volumes on the French Renaissance. Renan, who, at 
the time, had not made Mrs. Pattison's acquaintance, 
was most friendly to her book, which he presented 
to the Academic des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 
his report being extraordinarily favourable. Mrs. 

* See p. 64. 



64 



MEMOIR 



Pattison was consequently taken to see Renan and his 
wife, and from tliis visit commenced an intimate friend- 
ship between her and Madame Renan. For many 

years the correspondence 
with Madame Renan was 
very close. When she died 
in 1894 Lady Dilke wrote 
an obituary notice of great 
beauty, which contained 
one of the finest of Madame 
Renan's letters. In printing 
it she naturally omitted 
Madame Renan's invitation 
to her to continue through 
life her studies in the same 
line, advice based upon the 
ground of a "unique com- 
bination of imagination, phi- 
losophy, and erudition." 

The reviews of the " Re- 
naissance " afterwards went 
on increasing in warmth, up 
to that of the Debats of July 
29, which expressed the 
respect of France for the 
" learning, research, and 
genius' displayed in 
volumes written, unhappily, in a foreign tongue. Of 
the illustrations of the "Renaissance" some, such as 
the " Diane," are specimens of the delicacy of Mrs. 
Pattison's drawing. 

In a letter (November 3, 1880) to her niece. Miss 
Gertrude Tuckwell, which begins by describing the 
arrangements which the Rector had been making for 

* From a letter from Mrs. Pattison to Caldecott and his wife, — 
" Did you ever see a Provencal boggart ? They are made of straw, 
like this." 




A "boggart."* 



MRS. EARLE AND LORD ACTON 65 

Miss Tuckwell to keep house for him at Lincoln 
College during her aunt's absence, she goes on, " I 
enclose a precious autograph for your father. A 
friend asked M. Renan to give him his note of the 
little speech which he made on presenting my book 
to his Academy. Next week I go away for a couple 
of days to Cannes to stay with Lady de Rothschild 
and her daughters, but I shall make no other move 
before the end of February, when I shall, if my funds 
don't give out, try again for Rome." A few days later 
in November, she wrote to Mrs. Earle a letter describ- 
ing the same visit to Cannes, which shows how 
numerous were Mrs. Pattison's interests, in spite of 
her ill-health and of her heavy work. 

" My dear Theresa, 

" I have been thinking of you incessantly 
the last ten days, and on going over to Cannes ... I 
made a visit which has given me a positive reason 
for writing. I called on Miss Pearson . . . sister of 
Charles Pearson.* . . . She, from her sick-bed, directs 
the arrangements made for the nurses who come to 
Cannes to take bad cases in the season, and was 
anxious to see me, because the said nurses, and their 
comrades in London, wished to form a union and to 
join the League." 

It was on the occasion of this visit to Cannes 
that Lord Acton wrote in his published letters, 
December 14, 1880, that he "was amazed at the 
knowledge and conversation of a lady, who turned 
out to be Mrs. Mark Pattison." 

In addition to Mrs. Pattison's regular work upon 

* He had left Oxford for Australia on account of his health, and 
became Minister of Education of Victoria. His writings published 
after his return will be familiar to readers. 

K 



66 MEMOIR 

her books, upon the Paris Salon, for the Annual 
Register articles, upon the Encyclopaedia, and such 
work as articles on Poynter and J. P. Laurens for 
the Magazine of Art, and, at his request, on Sir F. 
Leighton, — the first article in the volume " Modern 
Artists," — she found time to deliver an address at the 
Midland Institute at Birmingham, and commence a 
certain amount of work for the Athencenm. In the 
last-named journal a learned review of the German 
Art "Jahrbuch" became annual after 1879. A special 
turn towards landscape was manifest at this moment. 
Notes on Fragonard, which had excited a good deal 
of attention when they appeared in the Academy in 
1878, were in part due to residence at Grasse and the 
unusual opportunity of sight of the famous Fragonard 
room. 

About the same time she wrote an article on Poussin 
from her notes collected in her journeys between 1861 
and 1879, while Fromentin was also carefully annotated, 
Eugene Miintz asked her to write the life of Claude. 
At his request she undertook this considerable labour, 
and the visit to Rome of 1881 was connected with its 
preparation. 

A letter from M. Emile Michel, the highest French 
authority of the time on Claude, in a correspondence 
between himself and another French art writer, 
describes Mrs. Pattison's Claude book as "a remark- 
able study, full of value by reason of the profit that 
all French admirers can draw from so fresh a reve- 
lation of his talent;" and he adds that "the keeper 
of the prints at the National Library agrees" with 
him, and that "this is a general opinion." The Revue 
des Deux Mondcs accorded to Mrs. Pattison's " Claude " 
the unusual honour of a long special article, full of 
the highest praise. 

Part of the " Claude " appeared in articles, the 
complete book being published in 1884. The success 



WRITINGS IN FRENCH 67 

was so much more considerable than that of Mrs. 
Pattison's works in English which preceded or im- 
mediately followed it, that it was difficult to induce 
her to write in English, rather than in French, her 
four volumes on the Eighteenth Century. The advice 
given to her by her friends, after the triumph of her 
" Claude," to return to her native tongue, and the 
comparatively small interest roused by ''Art in the 
Modern State," made it an uphill task to persuade 
her, as we did, that she should write mainly in 
English. I even ventured, in later years, to quote to 
her (when she was expressing the greater pleasure 
that she had in writing for La Gazette des Beaux 
Arts in French, than in her English volumes) the 
example of Chaucer, who, though justly proud of 
his French scholarship, wrote for his own English 
people in their own tongue. Writing at a later date 
from Paris with reference to the success she had had 
with French critics, she said, " It does encourage me, 
but not as to England. It only relieves me from feel- 
ing that nobody wants my work. I thought when I 
was looking at Christophe's statue and hearing what 
he said of it, yesterday, that if you once begin to say 
nobody wants your work, you very soon do nothing 
but work that nobody wants." 

Some interesting passages on the relations of an 
author of learned work to the public are to be found in 
her correspondence with Eugene Miintz, which ex- 
tended over many years. Mrs. Pattison had written 
to Muntz in 188 1 on his " Raphael," in letters from 
Siena, Orvieto, and Oxford : two of the latter contain- 
ing also words of Mark Pattison's for Muntz upon the 
subject. She had said that the book was perhaps 
"too full and too complete for that idle and superficial 
person, ' the public' " Sixteen years afterwards Lady 
Dilke wrote to Muntz, who had been returning to the 
same point : " The profound love of study was always 



68 MEMOIR 

scarce. But, formerly, when it was displayed by any 
one it was easier for others to mark it for themselves 
and to make it known. Nowadays the truly learned 
are comme noyes par I'envahissement de la foule im- 
mense qui se plait dans les connaissances moyennes." 
After consoling Miintz in this strain, she went on to 
tell him that his series of books on Italian art must 
always have a public, inasmuch as at the worst there 
were the travellers " ayant un peu d'instruction." 

There are passages on landscape art written by 
Mrs. Pattison in French for the "Conclusion," and 
preceding the important appendices of her " Claude," 
which have been praised by French writers as much 
as some passages m stories in " The Shrine of Death" 
and " The Shrine of Love " have been praised by 
English critics. Personally, I prefer the develop- 
ment which she has given to her theory of landscape 
in the notes for what was to have been a chapter of a 
book left half finished. The doctrine is the same. It 
is thus expressed by her in her " Claude Lorrain " : 
" L'amour de I'art et I'amour de la nature, telles sont 
les deux voies qui conduisent au meme but. L'amour 
de I'art nous fait voir les mille tresors que la nature 
derobe aux yeux indifferents ; l'amour de la nature 
doit nous ouvrir les portes de I'art." In articles in 
the Academy on Delacroix in September, 1880, and 
in the Athenceiim on Fromentin in July, 1881, and in 
the notes and sketches upon which her singularly 
careful " Salons " were based, it is easy to see a con- 
tinual growth of sentiment for nature, and for 
landscape. 

There is necessarily repetition in the various 
letters and working notes in which Lady Dilke dealt 
at different times with landscape art. To print 
portions of her correspondence on the subject with, 
for example, a little-known French painter, Victor 
Pollet, for whose judgment on art she had the highest 



LANDSCAPE ART 69 

veneration, or with Eugene Muntz, or again with that 
extraordinary person, Hastings, Duke of Bedford, 
who helped her greatly with her " Claude," would be 
to run the risk of undue expansion. The Duke of 
Bedford's letters would tempt one off the path, for 
they are pleasantly adorned with characteristic epi- 
gram having little relation to the subject. An allusion, 
for example, to the drawings at his London house, or 
at Woburn Abbey, produces the explanation that "in 
these uncertain times" his collections are unlikely to 
" long survive the life tenant." There are large notes 
upon the subject of landscape art to be found scattered 
throughout a correspondence with M. Andre Michel, 
which seems to have followed the publication, in 1896, 
of a volume in which he wrote on Corot, Millet, and 
on modern landscape. I prefer to make some brief 
extracts from a half-finished volume, not now to see 
the light. In it Lady Dilke took up once more, in 
1904, her theme of 1863 — the result of her study of 
Poussin at Vienna. Of Lady Dilke's writings upon 
Andre Michel, I note only that she thought it the 
highest praise which could be given to him to state 
that he stood next to Paul Mantz — " the most sane 
and admirable critic whom the nineteenth century has 
produced." The critic of modern landscape, as of all 
painting, should be supreme, she thought, in the 
rare qualities of sincerity without brutality, learning 
without prejudice, freedom from the usual affec- 
tations. He should look at works bearing the names 
of distinguished men of the most opposite tenden- 
cies, with a cool judgment, not excluding delicate 
sensitiveness to the finest shades, and with honest 
effort at impartiality in choice. 

Her studies at Vienna and in the other great 
collections of the drawings of the landscape painters 
of all time, had led her to rank Poussin extraordinarily 
high. She invariably professed herself astounded by 



70 MEMOIR 

his amazing power of composition: "it is purely 
academic in character, but stands in the highest class 
of its kind, and, like every great exercise of human 
intelligence, has its just claim on our accurate appre- 
ciation." "Such appreciation cannot be won by 
merely looking at his work. Pencil in hand, we must 
ourselves reconstruct the systematic base on which 
the pictorial presentment rests. The laziest of us can 
be pleased with the witching suggestiveness of 
Claude's winged flight through illimitable light and 
distance. Other qualities have made the influence 
of Poussin a living power, even now, over all those 
landscape painters who care for the most essential 
elements of the world of nature, and who attempt 
to incorporate something of their majesty in design. 
. . . When we approach the landscape of Poussin, we 
realize the incalculable value of the severe studies, 
which gave a pedantic character to much of his other 
work," She then discussed the bacchanalian Poussins, 
and showed how in the groups of the early pictures, 
such as that at Chantilly, "careering after old Silenus, 
as drunk with the excitement of their mad frolic as 
their leader is with wine," " although the attendant 
nymphs betray the tendency to pose, which recalls 
the heroines of the classic stage, we see the dawn of 
feeling for the sympathetic union of humanity and 
nature." 

To Claude, Lady Dilke thought, belonged the 
honour of having seen, in the very middle of the 
seventeenth century, a corner of wild nature. While 
the great king of France employed his landscape 
artists to paint the leaves of elm-tree hedges cut out 
of tin, " Claude plunged into the woods and lost 
himself in the contemplation of distant horizons." 
She showed, from the nature of his early work, how 
Claude had found his inspiration in approach to 
nature rather than in the teaching of the schools. 



CLAUDE LORRAIN 71 

" He sought that which was stable and harmonious 
in the fleeting image," and it was for this reason that 
Claude's work still " possesses — as does all work 
strongly felt — a certain moral force." This " brings 
into play — for all who can feel and see with him — 
a current of appreciation;" but "it is always easier 
to dream than to think. Thus Poussin . . . has found 
fewer followers than Claude. Even the best endowed, 
as, for example, Corot, may begin with this ideal, 
only to find his way later in le lyrisme, that is to say, 
on the line traced by Claude." Lady Dilke then went 
on, in her proposed chapter upon landscape art, to 
trace the ultimate effect of the third influence which 
made itself felt in the landscape of the seventeenth 
century, namely, that of the Dutch Masters. But 
she soon returned to " the energetic will of Poussin, 
his abstract tendency, his proud disdain of those 
capricious effects of light which were the joy of 
Claude," and pointed out the decline, in all the 
various schools, of followers and pupils. 

After analyzing the character of Claude's sense of 
nature, and that of the other chief landscape painters, 
as illustrated in their work. Lady Dilke wrote, " This 
rare and delicate gift — the feeling for life in land- 
scape — belongs to those alone who have a sense of 
the Invisible, of the intangible air, the colourless 
aether, which is everywhere yet nowhere about us." 
The true landscape painter must " seek in the mirror 
of nature the vibration of the human soul," and 
"catch sight of the secret life of nature in moods 
which inspire his own." Lady Dilke returned at the 
very last to her final appreciation of landscape in 
the following words : "After having analyzed every- 
thing that 1 have ever seen, I am inclined to think 
it easier to find words for the floods of golden glory, 
by which Claude indicates to our fancy the enchant- 
ments of his own, than to procure the recognition 



72 MEMOIR 

by others of the peculiar value of Poussin's art, 
consisting, as it largely does, in his superb science 
of construction. The architecture, so to say, of his 
compositions, always magnificent in proportion and 
symmetry, is infinitely varied." She had always felt 
" the beauty of much that he produced," but did not 
herself understand wherein it lay, until she had 
worked out for herself, by long and patient study of 
the drawings, the whole theory of his Art. 

There is much which bears on landscape in the 
correspondence with Eugene Miintz, as, for instance, 
a letter of June 13, 1881, dated from Oxford, in which, 
after laying down the law to him, she suddenly breaks 
off with the words, " I fear I am becoming sadly 
dogmatic." It is not necessary to quote from her 
letters passages to prove her sentiment of nature 
and of landscape, for her own pages given in this 
volume contain a sufficient representation of her 
imaginative side. During winter visits to Toulon, 
where I had a house upon the cliffs at Cap Brun, 
I used sometimes to try my hand by letter in con- 
tests with Mrs. Pattison, each of us describing the 
Provencal weather common to our cottages, though 
the scenery of Draguignan, where she was living, in 
the north-east of the Department of the Var, was very 
different from that of the Mediterranean coast. Her 
victory over me was, of course, complete. I have 
one letter in which I had written on a mistral that 
" to the clear sky it " had " suddenly brought clouds, 
and over me twisted and tore them into the wool of 
a negro's head. All was still below — the sea partly 
lava-coloured and partly steel. Then came a clap of 
thunder, and our traditional ' three drops of rain,' and 
then the cold wind, and the stars." She sent it back 
to me, having written on it in one of the pauses of 
her work : " Provengal weather — absurd blasts coming 
from no one knows where — dropping down on you 



CONTINENTAL IMPRESSIONS 72> 

and blowing you round and round ; jumping upon 
your back from the east, and then flying in your face 
from the west, with pelting rain : then rushing down 
from the Maumont and shaking the house to its 
foundations : then turning about and coming in from 
the south, slapping every shutter to, with angry claps, 
to open them again as noisily. Over all a white sun 
and hurrying grey cloud." 

Mrs. Pattison's letters of 1881 were specially inte- 
resting, and in one of them she seemed to have 
found the reason : " Yes, I know that it is good for me 
to have been at Rome again — good in every way. I 
get an amount of stimulus, intellectual and moral, 
from that kind of visit, which is just what I want and 
can't find the like of anywhere else." She went on to 
discuss London and Oxford with her correspondent, 
who knew both, and then declared that while good 
male society could be found in many places, what was 
also necessary to a woman was the sympathy of active- 
minded and intelligent women, which alone could 
create "an atmosphere, all the pleasanter for its 
rarity." Her life in Rome among political men and 
women undoubtedly widened her horizon and caused 
her to write to other correspondents upon subjects 
previously shunned as beyond her spheres of interest. 
She wrote, for example, in the same month as the 
last two letters quoted, of French politics: "The 
isolation of Gambetta is the necessary consequence 
of his being felt to be the stronger. Men resent the 
sense of strength greater than their own, except 
when they are in desperate need. ... It is just the 
same thing that one notes every day in the ordinary 
commerce of life. The moment people suspect you of 
being able to form a judgment instead of accepting 
opinions, those who accept opinions shrink from you 
until you are strong enough to impose your own. 
This, unless one is porphyrogenitus, takes time." 

L 



74 MEMOIR 

To this same year of great intellectual activity — 
1 88 1 — belong a good many letters from Leighton 
dealing with art criticism. The English academician 
represents throughout the correspondence the ordi- 
nary view, against opinions, less usual, put forward 
by Mrs. Pattison, but elsewhere sufficiently expressed 
by her in her writings. From a visit to Madrid, 
Leighton seemed to have brought back exactly the 
ordinary view of Velasquez and of the Spanish school ; 
and in his treatment of the frescoes of Puvis de 
Chavannes, also, there is nothing out of the way. The 
latter was one of the many friends of whom Mrs. 
Pattison had now begun to see a good deal each year 
in Paris. After her annual working visit to the Salon, 
during which she slaved so hard as to exhaust herself, 
and was unable to permit friends to accompany her, or 
those who met her to arrest her attention, she used to 
return to the exhibition with the artists and compare 
their views, bearing as they did on her articles of the 
following year, with those which she had despatched 
to the Academy. There is no trace in her criticisms on 
either the English or the French painters of her having 
allowed her friendships to influence her critical judg- 
ment. With all her admiration for the noble concep- 
tions of Puvis de Chavannes, she treated him as she 
had treated Ruskin. Just as she made amends to Pater, 
after Pater's death, so I never knew her so completely 
favourable to Puvis de Chavannes as she became at 
Lyons in a visit which we paid to his frescoes on 
the staircase of the Museum after the painter was 
dead. 

The unique position in the art world of Paris which 
Mrs. Pattison had secured by 1881, and retained for 
life, was that which her book on the Renaissance and 
her annual review of the Salons had won. It was 
confined to the world of art. The subsequent triumph 
of her eighteenth-century books introduced her to 



FRENCH ARTIST FRIENDS 75 

a wider public. Among the painters who accom- 
panied her in her visits to the Salon, her admiration 
was accorded to " old " Frangais, chief of the water- 
colour school, and Gustave Moreau, Among sculptors 
she had more real friends. Gustave Moreau was half 
mad, and it is possible that respect for his genius made 
her a little blind to his imperfections. For " old " 
Frangais she had the veneration that she felt for 
Christophe among sculptors, and for a few women, 
such as Madame Renan. 

It was, as has been said, the intention of Lady 
Dilke to write a book some day upon her artist friends, 
and the notes upon Frangois Louis Frangais possess 
special interest, on account of her enthusiasm for him. 
After his death she set down roughly, in pencil, ready 
for "writing," "I last saw M. Frangais when he paid 
me the compliment of a special visit in reference to the 
monument which it was proposed to erect to Claude 
at Nancy. His years — he was then seventy-nine, I 
think — sat lightly on him ; he had that magnificent air 
of youthful energy and strength which seemed to lift 
him above other men. I asked myself, was he taller, 
broader of build, richer in mind, than they ; or did he 
only seem so because of the wonderful spring of life 
that was in^him ? In any company one felt that he was 
the youngest, the one who could enjoy most keenly, 
feel most acutely — who had, in fact, the most vitality. I 
had first met him, at his kind wish, through M. £mile 
Michel, where indeed I afterwards met him again at 
lunch. Bright and brilliant were the men who had 
gathered round the distinguished host ; but I got the 
same vivid impression of a contrast between the young 
men who were old and the old man who was young. 
He possessed, in spite of years, the joy of life, inspired 
by the passion of his art." But even here there come 
the signs that Mrs. Pattison's judgment was never 
lost in admiration. "Not so great a master, in the 



ie MEMOIR 

scientific sense of the word, as the great master of all 
the living landscape men, Harpignies. Not always 
inspired, sometimes only gravely laborious and patient 
in endeavour, Fran^ais had his moments of divine fire." 
There follow notes of his last conversation with her, 
unfortunately too incomplete for use, in which he 
reminded her that he had worked under Corot, and 
was indeed one of " the men of 1830." 

When Mrs. Pattison reached home in 1881, after 
her return from her longest stay abroad, which had 
run on late into the spring, owing to unusually pro- 
longed visits to Rome and Paris, she worked hard 
in the practical business of obtaining candidates for 
membership of the branch of the Women's Trade 
Society at Oxford. She went round to the women 
working at the clothing factories and in other trades, 
and obtained their promises, and she afterwards 
prepared rules for their organization. Mrs. Nettle- 
ship writes, " The movement was entirely due to 
Mrs. Pattison's unflagging energy, and her great 
personal influence among the women, whom she 
visited in their homes, besides inviting them to her 
house. . . . The older members have never forgotten 
her, and still speak of her with great aff'ection." 

Allusion has already been made to the constant 
interest taken by Mrs. Pattison in the early steps in 
life of young girls, and her constant helpfulness to 
them, which many of them have recognized in recent 
letters. It was never exhibited with more pains- 
taking care than in this same year of 1881. It was in 
that year that she wrote from her little villa to her 
favourite niece a letter which is an admirable example 
of the trouble taken to help young girls in their 
difficulties, such as they continually, from about chat 
time to the end of her life, brought to her. 



LETTERS TO HER NIECE ^^ 

"Draguignan, January 7, 1881. 
"Dearest Gee, 

"... Read M. Renan's ' Souvenirs ' and 
you will see by what slow steps and with what 
struggles a mind which has really held convic- 
tions modifies or changes those convictions ; what 
years of earnest labour are involved in a real 
change of attitude towards beliefs which have been 
truly a part of our mental possessions ; what pro- 
found meditation is required before we can have a 
title to deny or to affirm. This is too grave and 
weighty a matter for me, dear Gee, to do more than 
call your attention to, but I know that you will at 
least enjoy the beautiful French of M. Renan and feel 
the attraction of a noble tone of thought. I am glad 
you are keeping up your Greek and Latin. . . . The 
work at making it out is in itself good, and will 
exercise your powers of concentration." 

She then offers to receive and correct the Latin, 
and to ask "the Rector to correct your Greek." 

A little later she takes the trouble, in an immense 
press of work and of social engagements in Rome, 
to write to the same young girl — 

"February ii, 1881. 
" My dearest Gertrude, 

" I am very glad to hear that you will have 
a week with the Rector. As to work, in so far as 
it means exercising your brains in acquiring know- 
ledge, it is the nourishment of thought. As to work 
in . . . what one can produce, it is a very trifle, and 
seems, compared to the sum of human activity, a 
worthless trifle. Yet the desire to do something is a 
natural, wholesome desire, and a stimulus towards 
the effort needed for the acquirement of knowledge 
valuable in itself — valuable, not as a means or tool for 



7^ MEMOIR 

the doing of anything, but as putting us on a high step 
whence we can command a wider range of thought. 

" It must be many years before — on a question 
such as that of religious belief, which involves for its 
right apprehension by the intellect considerable dis- 
cipline of the mind in the field of metaphysical specu- 
lation — any one can form what you call 'opinions.* 
This need not discourage you, but only help you to 
bear the unsettled condition in which you turn from 
one set of crude positive opinions to another. What 
you ultimately may come to be able to see will 
depend on the efforts you may meanwhile be making 
towards the strengthening and disciplining of your 
own mind, — in the acquisition of knowledge and 
ordering of the knowledge you may acquire." 

When Mrs. Pattison was compelled by ill-health 
to be abroad, sometimes one of her nieces and 
sometimes one of Mark Pattison's nieces lived at 
Rector's Lodgings. A niece of hers, while keeping 
house at Lincoln College, had found herself deficient 
in some of the qualities needed. After practical 
advice, her aunt went on, " Don't you feel that one's 
body and one's heart and one's mind are the means 
whereby one lives, and that all three claim their 
proper amount of exercise and nourishment if they 
are not to perish ? " She protested against a statement 
which the niece had made, that as regarded the mind 
it was best to accept the conclusions of others 
"rather than to try for one's self" 

In the following year, a niece of hers, who was 
going to take a paid public post, commenced with 
Mrs. Pattison a correspondence that soon turned into 
a discussion as to the extent to which marriage should 
be the object of any woman's preparation for life. 
Mrs. Pattison did not strongly take either side, but 
insisted, as against certain popular views which had 



THE MARRIAGE QUESTION 79 

been quoted to her, " that the woman is an individual, 
having claims and rights of her own and duties to 
herself, which she is under a moral responsibility to 
fulfil. . . . The problem has to be solved both by 
men and women . . . how to reconcile one's own 
claims and rights with respect due to the claims and 
rights of others. . . . The woman's first object should 
be to make herself in soul and mind and body the 
best which she sees the possibility of becoming. 
If she can marry in such a way as to satisfy the 
requirements of her own nature ; if she and the man 
she marries are drawn together, not only by love ; if 
they can also strive together after the same moral and 
intellectual ideal, then marriage is the greatest bliss 
that life can offer." The "marriage which is a matter 
of social convenience" is not "a state greatly to be 
preferred to that of single life : as a means of 
subsistence offered to a penniless woman I hold it to 
be utterly abhorrent. Let us even suppose marriage 
the object. Even those who say so would agree that 
it is not undesirable that the woman as well as the man 
should be a free agent in contracting it, and only a 
woman who knows that her daily bread is secure can 
be a free agent. These are the grounds on which I 
should urge all penniless girls to strive by work to 
make themselves independent." She then passed on 
to advise upon various forms of paid work. " Mean- 
while, learn, read, think, know, all you can : every- 
thing one can acquire is always a gain and finds a use 
ultimately in life." 

Mrs. Pattison was vexed when her young friends 
showed that they were trying to run before they 
could walk. To one who had been asking ques- 
tions which ought to have involved the correct 
apprehension of metaphysical terms, she wrote, in 
February, 1882, " I can only guess that you have been 
reading prematurely books you might have read with 



8o MEMOIR 

profit ten years hence," after having "drudged" in 
order to obtain " the necessary mental training. The 
more one studies the growth of the highly com- 
plicated form of religion in which we have both been 
brought up . . . the more reverence one feels for the 
common bond it offers." Passing on to "the origin 
of its leading ideas," she adds, " On all this, however, I 
speak entirely as a lay critic. The Rector has most 
deeply studied the subject, and could help you with 
an authority I cannot pretend to." 

To one young correspondent Mrs. Pattison wrote 
on April 22, 1882, during the stress of work pre- 
liminary to the opening of the Paris Salon. This girl 
had expressed the widespread idea that active religion 
was most suitable to miserable lives. Mrs. Pattison, 
being in a hurry, compressed all this as follows : " As 
to the " comfortable and happy " not being religious, a 
wider experience of life will bring you face to face 
with many evidences to the contrary. You have yet 
to apprehend the most elementary facts about what is 
called 'religion' and the office it has fulfilled in the 
life and history of the human race." 

Other letters of some interest on similar subjects 
are dated from Lincoln College on July 3, 1882, and 
August 21, 1882. "One of the tests of whether we 
have rightly used our experience of life is to be found 
in the width and force of our sympathies for the lives 
and struggles of others, and in our consequent ability 
and readiness to help them." In the second letter she 
rebukes her correspondent, who, in reply to the 
words quoted above, had suggested that the sympathy 
was helpful chiefly by its assisting one's own mental 
comfort. After pointing to unselfish lives around, she 
went on to appeal to the test of self-examination. 
This, Mrs. Pattison thought, would generally, or at 
least " often, give a different answer to the one you 
put forward." 



LAST OXFORD YEARS 8i 

In this letter of August 21 she mentioned that she 
was starting on that day week from Oxford with the 
Rector. They were to cross on August 30, and she 
was then to go for a season to Royat, being once 
more threatened w^ith stiffening of the limbs. To 
Royat or to La Bourboule — sometimes to both — she 
was sent for many years. From Royat she wrote to 
the niece whose entrance upon salaried public service 
has been mentioned above, — " Surely it can't be im- 
possible for you to find the connection between your 
life in the sorrowful streets and the whole story of 
our national life. Your effort is puny by itself 
Taken in the mass of devotion, it is one of the fruitful 
services which are helping to make the England of 
the future." 

However busy Mrs. Pattison was, she always 
found time to read critical work that bore upon her 
own subjects. The relatives of a deceased editor 
have been good enough to send me letters dated from 
Lincoln College in December, 1882, and written when 
she was nursing the Rector in an illness which had 
begun in August. In these a minute point was dis- 
cussed : she had called the editor's attention to the 
employment of two different forms for the same thing, 
and he defended both. In her reply she made her 
case and ended, " But it was perhaps a piece of hyper- 
criticism such as Oxford is prone to indulge in, and 
the habit is as catching as the measles." Just as 
Cambridge men are apt to see certain superiorities in 
Oxford, so Mrs. Pattison, with her long Oxford train- 
ing, was always humble in her attitude towards the 
supposed exactitude of scholarship opposed by Cam- 
bridge to Oxford breadth. 

The year 1883 was, in spite of ill-health, as strenuous 
a year of work as had been 1881 and 1882. At the 
beginning of the year Mrs. Pattison was interested in 
the political topics which the composition of her 

M 



82 MEMOIR 

Annual Register articles had made prominent in 
her mind. At an earher date she had written, " I 
look — if Gambetta's life holds out— for a very whole- 
some and gradual development of social reforms in a 
socialistic sense. A great deal more than hitherto 
will be provided for the member of societ}^ out of 
common funds produced by common effort, and the 
nation, like the family, will recognize the obligation 
of keeping its drones ; " but, she went on, " If Gam- 
betta dies, and he is not of good constitution . . ." 
On January 2, 1883, she wrote, " I feel very unhappy 
about Gambetta's death ; it is a grievous loss. I had 
written the last paragraph of 'France in 1882' some 
days ago in fear of it, or that at best there would be 
a long retirement before him. One could not but 
recognize that his was the only big personality of 
which the Republic could boast, and that as long as 
he was there people wouldn't be so likely in a panic 
to hunt in other camps for a saviour. . . . What a 
blank it makes in the prospect of France at this 
moment : personahty is the great force after all, not 
knowledge nor wisdom." 

In the winter of 1882-3 Mrs. Pattison had made 
an attempt to stay some time in Oxford, but she had 
broken down in January, 1883, ^^^ had been forced 
to go away again. 

In a letter from Draguignan, of 1883, which begins 
with the sketch of the villa and half its view, given 
here in facsimile, she writes to Mrs. Earle, " I do 
wish I could have you here, my dear Theresa. I am 
. . . free to think and work as I will, and with that 
have rest for my thoughts. You must not fancy one 
can ever take such a boon for granted. It is a con- 
stant reason for work and praise." Mrs. Pattison was 
at this moment, as is shown in a letter dated five days 
later, working at double speed, trying to finish her 
" Claude," and she soon broke down again under the 




'Iliju, A-tJUi\\i}0 ~<! uuudis 



\nZL\ u/-i^ tyixx. u^"^ "^ 



uu 






fl^ c 









IC, C c^yir \>r 






facsimile: of a pen-and-ink sketch and part of a letter from 

MRS. PATTISON, dated MARCH 9, 1 883. 

[To /dec p. 82. 



MODERN ENGLISH ART S3 

eflfort. In April she returned to Oxford, where she 
spent the greater portion of the year. No sooner 
had she reached England than the Rector of Lincoln 
also again fell ill. 

Mrs. Pattison's account in the Academy of the 
Burlington House Exhibition of 1883 seems to deserve 
notice. Reviewing English work as represented by 
Poynter, Tadema, Orchardson, Millais, Leighton, 
Watts, Holl, Fildes, Boughton, and Woolner, she 
discussed the whole system of teaching of the Royal 
Academy. The part of the article which dealt with 
sculpture is noteworthy, and in the conclusion de- 
veloped her chief art-doctrine as to the manner in 
which the art of each age must change its forms of 
expression in accordance with the changes in the 
moral thought of the world. "The aesthetic per- 
ceptions adjust themselves with sensitive instinct 
to find the means of translating" the new "moral 
aspect of things into corresponding aspects of colour 
and of form. However incomplete and offensive the 
works of the modern innovators of to-day may seem 
to us, with their dramas from the drawing-room and 
their 'tragedies' from the streets, however poor or 
absurd their methods of work may appear, we cannot 
ignore the fact that it is possibly to them that the 
future belongs." 

It is in this summer that I am inclined to date 
an account written by her of a visit of "The Brown- 
ing Society," which "came in force last night. ... It 
was very funny; a white-headed youth, name un- 
known, who first came in, fell on me with, ' I fear that 
you are not an admirer of our great poet.' I asked 
him how he came by the fear, upon which he retorted 
with, ' Had you appreciated Browning, I should have 
supposed that you would have become a member of 
this Society.' ... A lady then read a bit from 
' Balaustion's Adventure,' and made a remark to which 



84 MEMOIR 

no one responded ; she then tried a second, which she 
addressed to the Chairman, and which he received in 

dead silence. I turned to D M (Newdigate 

prizeman) and asked if the discussion was always as 
flat as this, to which he, ' I was just thinking that I had 
never been present at so brilliant a discussion since 
the foundation of the Society ; ' after this I subsided, 
and felt more than ever sure that I was not good 
enough for my company." 

The result of overwork and the struggle to remain 
in England was a return, at Oxford, at the beginning 
of October, of spinal neuralgia and nervous break- 
down. Injections of morphia administered for the 
spinal pain conduced probably to the facial paralysis 
and loss of power in the nerve of the eyes which 
for some time followed. Mrs. Pattison's letters of 
October and November, 1883, are written either in 
pencil or by another hand. 

On October 29, 1883, Mrs. Pattison wrote to a 
relative — 

"Rector's Lodgings, Lincoln College, Oxford. 
" This illness has been very serious. As soon as 
I can be moved, I am ordered to the South in charge 
of a nurse. The Rector is very ailing." A niece had 
arrived to take charge, but " I may not be able to 
start for about a fortnight." 

While Mrs. Pattison was abroad Eugene Miintz 
wrote her a long letter. After saying how unhappy 
he had been to see her condition, he went on, " May 
your quiet of mind be restored by quiet of body ! 
You are called by the precision of your research . . . 
you are called, I repeat, to exert the most salutary 
influence on art criticism. ... I treat as a public 
misfortune all that could suspend or hinder your 
original work. Let me say more : you have caused 



MARK PATTISON^S LAST DAYS 85 

us Frenchmen to blush by raising to one [Claude] 
who is a glory of our nation that monument which 
he had not previously possessed." 

Mrs, Pattison was soon recalled, ill as she was, 
from the South, by the Rector's grave illness ; but 
the great scholar showed his superiority to suffering 
by many cheerful letters. One to Miss Tuckwell, the 
favourite niece, dated from Lincoln College, February 
17, 1884, has the first page written by Mark Pattison, 
while the second and third are in Mrs. Pattison's 
hand, and the letter ends with a postscript by the 
Rector. Some of the statements in the letter are as 
critical as was frequent in the case of letters from 
Lincoln College ; for example the following, " Dean 
Burgon is a good creature, intensely narrow, full of 
faithful affection to Oxford." The pen in this part is 
that of Mrs. Pattison, but the letter is so constructed 
that it is not easy to be sure who is responsible for 
the opinion. 

In the long nursing of her husband during these 
years, while she was herself ill, Mrs. Pattison came 
nearer to a settled sadness of spirit than in any other 
portion of her life. One of the few letters of hers that 
I have seen which can be said to breathe a spirit of 
despondency is dated at this time. It contrasts an 
unhappiness which was " full of pity " with " the young- 
days under the horse chestnuts at South Kensington, 
when I loved and trusted life and every living soul, 
and all seemed to have some good gift for me ... If 
one life is to give way to the other, 1 feel sure it should 
be mine ; his is worth much more — it represents much 
more, of much greater value to the world than mine. 
I think he is the only truly learned man I know." 
On February 20, 1884, Mrs. Pattison wrote from 
"Rector's Lodgings" to Mr. Norman Maccoll, then 
editor of the Atheitceum, " I shall bring the Rector up 
to town on March 3. I will send you the address 



86 MEMOIR 

as soon as it is certain. I am in treaty for 33, 
Gloucester Place . . . My eyes are still weak. ... It 
will be a long time before the nerves (it is not the 
sight) get strong again. ... I want all myself to 
keep going." Even at this moment, however, she 
tried to keep up her work, though it shows a notable 
falling off in quantity in 1884. On March 2 she 
wrote to Miintz a letter which is in the Bibliotheque 
Nationale, and says the doctors have stopped her 
newspaper work; and on April 16, that sometimes 
her courage is failing. During the visit to London, 
almost the only sign of a fresh art note is the criti- 
cism which afterwards produced an interesting letter 
from Watts — 

"May 6, 1884, 

" Little Holland House. 

"My dear Mrs. Mark, 

" Work done by professional men is, as a 
matter of course, done for money ; so that while the 
design in question is a genuine expression of feeling, 
there was also, behind, the idea, more or less con- 
scious, that it would enable me to get bread and 
butter and models and colours and other etceteras. 
But it is one of two or three which I hope may be 
hereafter among those things that the world knows as 
something more than moderately good paintings. I 
have had the extreme satisfaction of finding that it 
has power to touch, quite in the manner I wish, the 
kind of people I most desire to be in accord with, 
therefore I decide that I will not at present part with 
it, but go on endeavouring to perfect it, and indeed, 
if I can afford to do so, eventually leave it to the nation. 
I do not think you have seen the pendant design 
which I call ' Love and Life.' Love is leading Life, 
symbolized by a very youthful fragile female figure, up 
a rocky steep — up the acclivities of human conditions. 



WIDOWHOOD 87 

I think you will like the design. I am sorry to hear 
so bad an account of you and of the Rector. 

" Yours affectionately, 

" SiGNOR." 

Sadness continued to be the note of all the letters 
of this winter and spring that I have seen, including 
one which rebuked a friendly correspondent who 
wanted Mrs. Pattison to pay greater attention to her 
own health, and who had unfortunately committed 
the unpardonable offence of alluding to "Middle- 
march : " I am all he has to look to . . . I purposely 
never read it, but to judge by what you tell me, and 
what I have heard from all, Mr. Casaubon was much 
more to be pitied than Dorothea." In May she was 
sent away for three days by the medical adviser of 
the Pattisons, and spent them at the house of Mrs. 
Earle, returning at once to Yorkshire, where the 
Rector of Lincoln was suffering greatly, but retaining 
his courage sufficiently to write a joint letter with 
Mrs. Pattison, as late as June 21, to Eugene Muntz. 

Mark Pattison died at the end of July, and after 
the funeral, his widow remained for a time in York- 
shire, where he had been buried with his people in 
accordance with minute directions given by him to 
her. From Harrogate Mrs. Pattison wrote to a dear 
friend of the Rector's about herself and another 
watcher, "She and I both want absolute quiet, and 
my head is very weak from the incessant watching 
of the last six weeks, after all that went before. ' 
Three weeks later she wrote from Harrogate to 
another friend, " My eyes have suffered again, and 
I do nothing now but live by rule and drive for 
hours in the hills." She wrote that she was going 
to leave, and had taken a house on the " top of 
Headington Hill . . . Mrs. Grant Duff proposes my 
going out to them later, and that is what I should 



SS MEMOIR 

like to do next spring, if I am forced to miss my south 
of France." In September Mrs. Pattison took from 
Lincoln College to her new home, Headington Lodge, 
near Oxford, those of her own things which she 
afterwards placed at Pyrford, where she died. 

It was in this year that she made an attempt to 
found a Drawing Scholarship for women at the 
Royal Academy, under conditions which her own 
master, Mulready, had, many years previously, sug- 
gested to her. After a correspondence, they were 
found unacceptable by the President. 

In leaving Oxford Mrs. Pattison lost sight of some 
old acquaintances. Many were before long removed 
by death, but some of the friendships she had made 
at Oxford were destined to last to the end of her life. 
One of the warmest was that with Mr. J. R. Thursfield, 
which had begun in 1864, and had grown into close 
intimacy when his mother came to live with him in 
Oxford in 1868. Mr. Frank Pattison, brother of the 
Rector of Lincoln, and Mr. Thursfield, were two of 
the three who rendered her the most assistance in 
revising, as she did while at Headington, the volume 
which contains the earlier part of the memoirs of 
Mark Pattison. To my friend Mr. Thursfield and to 
Mr. Frank Pattison I have to express my warm 
thanks for assistance received by me from them in 
the preparation of this Memoir. 

In the spring of 1885, though nothing was to be 
settled until July or August, we began to look forward 
to the possibility of happiness together. Late in 
February Mrs. Pattison left Headington for India, and 
up to June wrote to me from India that there could be 
no definite promise and "no tie" ; but there was enough, 
at all events on my part, to enable me to make some 
preparatory announcement to one friend and political 
colleague, while she had made a less definite expres- 
sion of her feeling to four others. My friend replied 



SECOND MARRIAGE 89 

to her, his letter beginning, " Dilke has told me his 
great secret." I find with his letter a pencil note of 
her reply, in which she said that she was proud that 
he should be really glad at what he called the prospect 
of happiness which was opening for me. While she 
was in India in the hills, during the hot weather of 
1885, the date of our wedding was fixed for the last 
week of October. In the Madras hills she was at- 
tacked by typhoid fever, and her recovery was not 
complete at a moment when her affection for me 
caused her to make the public announcement of our 
engagement. By the circumstances of our marriage, 
our lives became so closely joined together that, were 
I to write of her from this point as I have been 
writing hitherto, I should be telling my own story 
under guise of telling hers. Our lives were too much 
one life for it to be possible for me to record it. 
References to her work are possible, but other matters 
are too sacred. The day of our wedding was the 
only day of her life which she asked those we thought 
likely to survive her to commemorate when death 
should come. From the wedding-day, too, she wore, 
no doubt under a secret vow, an emblem chosen by 
me for her at her wish, which was beside her nineteen 
years afterwards when she died. Letters came to her 
at this time, and during the year, which showed how 
many there were who understood something of her 
true nature. Among them there was one, from a 
stranger, so expressive of what my wife intended her 
life to mean, that she kept it before her to the end. 
It had something to do with the inspiration of the 
last little book which will be found next to this 
memoir, in the present volume. 



# 



90 MEMOIR 



Lady Dilke's first considerable publication after our 
marriage — the first of all, indeed, that bore her new 
name, with the exception of one or two articles in the 
Fortnightly on the " Consolidation of France," which 
were part of her work towards the book of 1888, "Art 
in the Modern State" — was "The Shrine of Death" 
(1886). Some of the most competent of the admirers 
of her writings on French art are surprised, and 
almost indignant, that she preferred her tales, and 
valued more highly the appreciative criticism which 
they called forth than the praise lavished on her art 
volumes. Three things lived inside her own copy 
of her first book of fantastic stories — the letters 
of Pater and of Theodore Watts-Dunton, and an 
unfavourable report from the " taster " of a PYench 
publisher on the translation which a French admirer, 
at great expenditure of time and pains, had made.* 
Pater differed from some of the newspaper critics, 
who thought the stories overwrought, and wrote that 
to him their charm was that " the intellectual weight 
of purpose displayed in" what was to her "a new 
line of literature, was lightened by simplicity and 
ease." 

Mr. Watts-Dunton wrote : " As to the form, there 
is no doubt that you have a real sympathy with the 

* Some of the stories appeared in foreign newspapers and maga- 
zines in translation at later dates. For example, " The Crimson Scarf," 
published in "The Shrine of Death," appeared, I find, under the 
title " L'echarpe pourpre," in French, five years later, and there are 
traces of the publication of several others, but not of the dates or places. 
It had been my wish to append to this memoir a bibliography, which 
would have shown in striking form how vast was her production of 
work. It was found impossible to overcome the difficulties caused by 
Lady Dilke having failed to keep a full list of her contributions to the 
Annual Register and the Reviews. 



^^THE SHRINE OF DEATH ^^ 91 

old cadenced prose which has almost dropped out of 
our language. Some of your sentences I think very 
lovely. The only danger in this kind of work is that 
of pushing the imitation too far and passing into 
mimicry. In all imaginative literature there should 
be convincement, and the moment that the air of 
sincerity is disturbed by manifest exercise of mimic 
art, convincement dies a natural death. The great 
master of the art of drawing from antique forms all 
that can be drawn from them without passing into 
mimicry, is Coleridge in ' Christabel.' There are a 
few locutions of yours which struck me as too self- 
conscious in the imitative way." Those who were 
daily with Lady Dilke when she was writing stories 
know that the idea of imitating style was hateful to 
her, and conscious imitation impossible in her mode 
of work. But the air of imitation is as much to be 
avoided as the fact, and from that point of view Mr. 
Watts-Dunton's criticism was taken to heart when 
later stories — such as two which I have included in 
this volume — were written. 

Since her death Mr. Watts-Dunton has further 
written to me: "Among the authoresses of our time 
she held a place that was really unique. She had rare 
genius, and a personality, of which her work, good as 
it is, is a most inadequate expression. And then, 
besides this, her goodness of heart, her untiring bene- 
volence to people whose only claim upon her was that 
they needed succour, touched me very deeply, and 
excited a special admiration of her; for qualities of 
this kind are not supposed to be frequently associated 
with the artistic temper." 

One of the closest of the criticisms on " The Shrine 
of Death " was contained in a letter from Madame 
Renan. Writing from the College de France, at the 
end of 1886, Madame Renan said: "Vous savez que je 
suis de celles qui ressentent le plus la grace et le 



92 MEMOIR 

charme qui sont en vous. . . . Le don poetique, celui 
de rendre dans une langue si pure et si harmonieuse 
des impressions de I'ordre le plus eleve, m'abeaucoup 
frappee dans cette serie d'histoires ou Tame vit avec 
une intensite merveilleuse. 'A Vision of Learning' 
a un sens tres profond. 'The Serpent's Head' est un 
terrible drame dont la realite fait frissonner." 

In two pages of preface to the second volume of 
stories, published under the title "The Shrine of 
Love," in 1891, Lady Dilke alluded to the nature of the 
effect produced, in 1886, by "The Shrine of Death." 
She did not, however, explain what those who saw 
most of her well know, that she wrote her stories 
to lay ghosts. When some unpleasant tale began to 
haunt her, she used to tell us the nature of this " moral 
hallucination," and to say, " I shan't sleep until I have 
made a story of it." When the story had been told 
by her and then written down, that particular night- 
mare had been killed. 

In the preface of " The Shrine of Love " she plea- 
santly complained that her readers seemed to suffer 
from " the belief that the sadder stories were but a 
dim and partial revelation of some hidden and myste- 
rious intent ;" each was, she admitted, a record of the 
essential facts of some situation which she had known 
in real life. The critics did not discover that some of 
the illustrations were her own. The symbolic cross 
prefixed to " The Shrine of Death " has a background, 
representing Frejus as seen from the Roman amphi- 
theatre, while in the other volume the cut prefixed to 
" The Outcast Spirit " is again my wife's, and repre- 
sents the view from the garden in which stood her 
little house at Grasse. A better reproduction from 
her original sketch is here * introduced. Had the 
critics unearthed these " suggestive facts," they would 
have been more than ever certain that the stories 

* See p. 51. 



ORIGIN OF HER STORIES 93 

were related of, instead of being merely drawn from, 
personal experience. "A Vision of Learning" un- 
doubtedly contained some passing knocks at Oxford ; 
but in the other stories it was only landscape which 
was local, and the themes were invariably suggested 
by outside events : the tragedy, for example, related 
in " The Physician's Wife " was a real one, of which 
I possess the exact record, and was drawn from a 
foreign country. "The Triumph of the Cross," in the 
second volume, was a fanciful treatment of what might 
have happened when the Saracens were in the Pro- 
vencal "Mountains of the Moors." "The Crimson 
Scarf" dealt with the Moors in Spain, and " The 
Hangman's Daughter " — afterwards illustrated by Mr. 
Strang's etchings — with that tragedy of the starvation 
of the Protestants during the siege of La Rochelle, 
which, all through her life, had impressed the imagi- 
nation of Lady Dilke. 

I have a letter, happy throughout its length, dated 
in the middle of March, 1885, when Mrs. Pattison was 
on her journey to India — her return from which was 
to be the prelude to our wedding. It relates the com- 
position of one of the saddest of all the stories in 
"The Shrine of Death." After writing it in Paris on 
her w^ay, she had described it in a letter, to which 1 
had replied with playful expressions of sincere hope 
that it would not prove so " lugubrious " as she said. 
She answered with words of deprecation : " I am 
afraid the new story is the most unhappy of all ; but 
there are things in it which I think you will like." 
She always maintained, as has already been suggested, 
that the writing of sad stories formed a safety-valve, 
and allowed, in fact, her happy nature to have, as a 
rule, full play. 

The stories which follow her "Book on the Spiritual 
Life " in the present volume are two out of three 
finished ones, which, with two others not completed 



94 MEMOIR 

and five sketches and plans of stories, were pre- 
parations for a book. The third, which I have not 
printed, as others like it less than she did, affords, 
nevertheless, a curious example of the way in which 
these stories came to be born. During a whole winter 
my wife was annoyed, in her working-room at Pyrford 
Rough, which adjoined my own, by a tapping on a 
window-pane by tier side, supposed to be caused by a 
large, hard leaf of Irish ivy. She came several times 
into my room to tell me that the leaf had been troub- 
lingher again. I made the natural prosaic man's sugges- 
tion, that I should cut it ; but this she would not allow, 
because she said she would utilize it in a story, and 
unless she " let it tap " the story would not be written ; 
it must be suffered to worry her into writing. She 
duly wrote the story and laid the ghost, and then the 
tapping, which continued, no longer mattered to her 
in the least ; she had " done with it." The offending 
leaf, however, was glorified in the story, of which 
it became the hero. It saved the lovers, brought the 
girl from among her people to the spot where the man 
lay suffering, and died unrewarded and forgotten. 

The composition of the stories, to which Lady 
Dilke stoutly refused to give the name of work, in- 
volved a curious double concentration. Of all persons 
that I have met, she exceeded any in power of con- 
centration of thought upon the object which occupied 
her at the moment, whether it was work or play. 
When she was engaged upon what most people 
would call imaginative work, such as the construction 
in her mind, without pen or pencil, of a fantastic story 
like "The Mirror of the Soul," which is given here, 
she did not sit in her own room, as she did for her 
ordinary studies, but sat with me. Silently she would 
work with her hands at the restoration of a binding 
or of a torn page of a Lyons early-printed edition, 
or at drawing in decorative design, or at adapting 



HAPPINESS OF DISPOSITION 95 

historic costume to her own dress, for which sketches 
were invariably made ; and a double absorption took 
place at the same time — in the imaginative story and 
in the work of the hand. 

There is one observation of some importance in its 
bearing upon character which must be made in con- 
nection with the stories. They are fantastic ; but 
they are mostly sad — not only those of "The Shrine 
of Death," but even those of "The Shrine of Love." 
So, too, are those which are printed in this volume ; 
printed only because, as an eminent critic writes, 
"they are too good to go unprinted." They are not 
her message which she intended to be given : that 
message, meant for posthumous publication in her 
" Book of the Spiritual Life," is not blighted— as are 
many of her stories about others — by the note of sad- 
ness, but tells of triumph in the heroic accomplishment 
of purpose. 

Lady Dilke, at the very moment when she thought 
that nothing but happiness lay before her, had been 
called upon to undergo, for a time, the most poignant 
suffering of her life, because suffering entirely in and 
for another. She always maintained, however, that, 
with the exception of a few years of undue strain 
already mentioned, hers had been, and was, a most 
happy life, and laughed at those reviewers of " The 
Shrine of Death" who insisted that she had become 
"gloomy-minded." Moral suffering was borne by her 
as a rule with the same cheerfulness of spirit as was 
the torture she suffered for fifteen years from arthritic 
gout. From this physical pain she was set free by 
the changes caused by the typhoid fever of 1885, 
although that in turn left consequences from which, 
nineteen years later, she died. I cannot trust myself 
to write much of this last period ; but, in order to 
prevent a mistaken impression of gloominess arising 
from her tales, I give a few words from those who 



96 MEMOIR 

last heard her tell, three days before her death, of 
what she termed nineteen years of "unbroken happi- 
ness." One of them, in sending me an account of the 
conversation, suggests the very perplexit}^ in v^hich I 
had already found myself: " How difficult it is to give 
the impression of her — the wit and gaiety, as well as 
the depth!" 

The distinguishing feature of Lady Dilke, in the 
opinion of all who saw her, was, indeed, her constant 
gaiety of spirit. Eleanor Smith had written to me, on 
August i8, 1885, "You must remember-what a different 
temperament hers is to yours — much more elastic. 
So long as she is not touched in her deepest con- 
fidence and affection, she rises, like an indiarubber 
ball, in the face of trouble." She not only gave con- 
fidence fully, or, upon proof that it was not merited, 
withdrew it once for all, but she also inspired confidence 
in all about her. The result was a double gaiety : her 
own and that which her confidence evoked around 
her. It would be interesting to hear the views of her 
Paris friends, who, in later years, had seen her at her 
best, on the supposed sadness of her spirit. Men 
like M. Bonnat in the world of art, or any of her 
deeply attached private friends, who had never read 
her sad stories, would be amazed at the attribution to 
her of gloominess of mind. The impression of bril- 
liant gaiety was the first which she invariably made, 
at all events in Paris, on those who had not met her 
before. One night, at a dinner given in her honour 
at Christmas, 1903, the lady whom I took in, and 
whom I had not previously known, said suddenly, 
but very sweetly to me, " Vous devez bien vous 
amuser, Monsieur, tous les jours chez vous." Many 
a similar appreciation of her light-heartedness was 
addressed to us whenever we went into French 
society. On a different occasion, I remember, almost 
the identical words were used by an Academician 



DUG D^AUMALE 97 

whom I was sitting near at a dinner given for Lady 
Dilke to meet some of her old friends of the Academic 
des Beaux Arts. It is certain that, in the opinion of 
the best French talkers of the day, she held her own 
and shone in those circles of the Parisian world in 
which conversation is still practised as a fine art. 

Our first visits to Chantilly together had been 
serious, and are recorded in full notes of the pictures, 
especially those of the nineteenth century, headed 
" Ingres," " Decamps," " Delacroix," and " Fromentin " ; 
but from the date of the Due d'Aumale's first direct 
letter to Lady Dilke (September 25, 1895), asking us 
to spend a whole day in going through the books, the 
relations became of the pleasantest kind. I find in a 
letter from Lady Dilke to an intimate friend her 
impression of the first long morning which we spent 
at Chantilly with the Duke himself: "He knows about 
his books — and enjoys showing them." The charm, 
however, of these repeated visits of 1895 and 1896 lay 
in the fact that books and drawings alike excited 
historic memory in both the well-filled minds. We 
used to be with him, as a rule, for four or five hours 
on each occasion, and during the whole time the 
sparkle of the conversation never failed. The greatest 
of the charms of the Due d'Aumale was his store of 
anecdote, which had come to him through his family, 
and especially direct from the eighteenth-century 
Court through his father, who. in the last days, had 
been, as a boy, one of its ornaments. Those who 
knew the Due d'Aumale at other people's houses 
never saw him at his best, for it was the treasures 
which he had gathered round him in the home of the 
Condes which alone called forth that biographic his- 
tory in which he excelled. In 1895 and 1896 we were 
with the Due d'Aumale at the arrival of the post which 
brought the mass of his Christmas cards and tele- 
grams, and as they were opened for him, and the 

o 



98 MEMOIR 

names announced, whilst we were sitting in the library 
with the books and drawings, he would break into 
family anecdote at almost every name. So soon as 
the anecdotes acquired enough antiquity to become 
historical, the stores of knowledge were illuminated 
by wit. At the beginning of May, 1897, the sudden 
death of the Duke drew forth a little article on him 
by Lady Dilke. In spite of the sadness of the cir- 
cumstances of his death, which caused a deep note 
of pathos in portions of the obituary, the greater part 
of it is, nevertheless, in the brightest note, inasmuch 
as it recalled the brightness of their talks. 
^ One of Lady Dilke's best friends in France, Madame 
Emile Ollivier, wrote, May 30, 1897, that she had 
shown this obituary notice to that old friend of the 
Due d'Aumale, the Princesse Mathilde (the daughter of 
Jerome, King of Westphalia), Napoleon's last surviv- 
ing niece. " Chere amie : Je voulais voir la Princesse 
avant de vous dire combien j'aime votre article, qui 
est ce que j'ai lu de meilleur, comme sentiment et 
comme interet, sur le due d'Aumale. Son Altesse en 
a juge tout a fait comme moi et me charge de vous 
dire tous ses remerciments pour votre souvenir et 
votre sympathie, qui I'ont bien touchee." Madame 
Ollivier went on to write of the losses which she and 
Lady Dilke had sustained by that fire at the Charity 
Bazaar which had indirectly caused the Due d'Aumale's 
death, through that of the Duchesse d'Alengon, his 
favourite niece. Another of my wife's dearest friends 
in France, the Marquise de Sassenay, had escaped, but 
several of her relations who were with her had died 
a dreadful death. 

Lady Dilke used to amuse children and myself — 
rarely others — by comic work, of which she never but 
once published any specimen, and that only at my 
most earnest solicitation. By my strenuous persua- 
sion a cat story, of excellent humour, written for my 



HER LIGHT-HEARTED NATURE 99 

amusement, was published in 1890 in one of the maga- 
zines. Even this, however, had a fantastic ending. As 
a favourable, but puzzled reviewer in one of the news- 
papers said of the hero, " A psychic mystery is involved 
in the end of its life, or rather the termination of one 
of the phases of its existence." The story had also a 
double meaning, perhaps even a treble meaning, like 
"The Mirror of the Soul" — a parable with its second 
interpretation obvious, but contradicted by the title, 
while the third meaning is to be mastered only by 
that key. 1 may perhaps, at this distance of time, 
let out the secret that we omitted in publication an 
introduction which began, " I once had a cat that 
talked. Its grandmother had been in the family of 
the editor of the Spectator." 

As it is necessary to give here a true picture, I 
have asked some of Lady Dilke's closest friends how 
they would describe what I called the "dancing side" 
of her nature which we knew so well — her habit of 
chaffing herself, her work, and me ; her constant play- 
fulness of mind, kept for home, for children, or for her 
intimate friends. One of the latter reminds me that 
Lady Dilke once said, when they were half exhausted 
with fatigue, " Perhaps, after all, we are making the 
comfortable uncomfortable without making the uncom- 
fortable any more comfortable." Another answers, 
" Her capacity for absolute abandonment to pure 
animal spirits and childish gaiety gave her the power 
she undoubtedly possessed over all young people, 
and in England it was only they who knew this side 
of her — like the sixteen-year-old American girl cousin, 
who commented on having passed a week alone with 
her and never having been dull for a moment. In 
the ' grown-up ' world this side of her was best 
known to French friends, for in England we do not 
understand an attitude which she was able to assume 
with her foreign tongues." 



loo MEMOIR 

Those, indeed, who are familiar with several lan- 
guages, learn instinctively to take the natural manners 
of the people who are for the moment their com- 
panions in the world. So it was with Lady Dilke, 
when she had been for a few days in any country. 
One faculty possessed by those who are accustomed 
to speak rather than write foreign tongues was as 
wanting in her as was tune in her singing, or metrical 
skill in her poetry — she was wholly unable (on 
account, I think, of her great concentration) to pass 
from one language easily to another, and the attempt 
would cost her absurd mistakes in English as in 
other tongues. In Paris she was French, with suffi- 
cient difference to give distinction ; but to translate 
bright French conversation into English is impossible. 
Lady Dilke knew better than to make any such 
attempt. Hence, on this side the Channel, a reserve, 
which, if not explained, would be added to the sad 
note of the written stories, and produce a one-sided, 
if not a false estimate of her nature. 

Another of her friends writes, '' She had an extra- 
ordinary attraction for children and for animals, 
due, I think, as much to the intense power of concen- 
tration, which enabled her to project herself, when 
she chose, into the existence of her companion, as 
to her intense vitality. Instinctively, and without 
effort, she became the equal of tiny playmates, and 
won the hearts of little boys, so that when nursery 
tea was over the door was blocked by their 'arms to 
prevent her exit. In another case we saw her, to the 
amazement of the mother, who never previously knew 
her daughter expansive to a stranger, wander off 
hand-in-hand, exchanging flowers with a mite of six 
years old, as grave and round-eyed as the reticent 
little child herself All animals greeted her as a 
natural ally and playmate." Our fox-terrier, " Fafner," 
knew her in her gayest vein, and loved her beyond 



GREECE loi 

any other friend, even to this day pursuing with 
enthusiasm, till close approach brings crestfallen dis- 
appointment, every distant woman's figure on the 
roads near Pyrford, in the hope that his beloved 
mistress has returned at last. 

Her relations with animals — close in the case of 
her horses, for, when health would allow, she was an 
enthusiastic horsewoman — had, however, their sadder 
side. " Fafner " had had a much-loved father, the dog 
of our first Pyrford year, of the winter of 1885. My 
wife had been forced to strike him once for being, in 
old age, dangerously jealous of his young son. She 
used to tell me that she could never forgive herself 
for having done so. Daily she would visit his grave 
to censure herself for having hurt the old dog's heart. 

All letters coming to me as I pen this memoir 
strike this same note, for they are the letters of the 
intimate friends to whom the happier side of her 
nature stood revealed. I had written the last sen- 
tence when there reached me one from Mrs. W. P. 
Reeves, wife of the Agent-General of New Zealand, 
and an active member of the Women's Trade Union 
League : " When I think about her, what I remember 
is, how happy she was, with all her lovely fun mixed 
up with her hard, hard work. The thought of her 
cannot make one sad, but only fonder." Let those, 
then, who read the fantastic stories remember that in 
them the sadness of life was written off and laid aside, 
in order that the joy of life might reign, and life 
itself be directed to the ends fitly closed by her book 
that follows. 

In 1887 we visited Greece and the eastern Mediter- 
ranean. Between this tour and a visit which we 
paid to India, late in 1888, Lady Dilke prepared for 
the press her book on "Art in the Modern State," 
wrote most of the stories for " The Shrine of Love," 
as well as some articles for the Fortnightly Review, 



I02 MEMOIR 

and continued her survey of German art studies in 
the annual notices of the "Jahrbuch." Her private 
notebooks of 1887 are very full, and deal with subjects 
of much diversity, almost all, however, connected by 
what may be called a religious bond. Her first entry 
in the notebook of this time is merely headed 
" Details, and the Whole," but it is, in fact, a private 
essay on the effect of mere biography in drawing 
away the mind from the speculative questions which 
must be worked out before any basis can be arrived 
at for historical treatment of a period. The illus- 
trations which she chose for herself to prove how 
indispensable political and religious history is to a 
thorough understanding even of the arts of an}^ time, 
show this tone, for she traces in the French painters, 
poets, and playwrights of the seventeenth century, the 
influence of the ideas of Pascal, and of the Arnaulds, or 
school of Port Royal. In notes on art administration 
she turned again, towards the end, to the same theory. 
" The revolution to correct the seventeenth-century 
reaction, by which the Renaissance had been turned 
against itself, is now : it is the duty of all of us 
to take part in it. It may be pleasant to say with 
Lucretius — 

' ... nil dulcius est, bene quam munita tenere 
Edita doctrina sapientum templa serena ' ; 

but all are called upon to aid. When we see the loss 
of moral temperament which the classical attitude 
involves one must say, ' This man decided not to be, 
but only to know.' To experience all things properly 
involves, however, knowing all things. Short of that, 
is the contemplative life more perfect than the prac- 
tical ? Either by itself is but a half-life, and the ideal 
must be placed in the satisfaction of all the energies." 
Next comes in this same crowded notebook _ the 
history of the development of herself, ultimately given 



INNER LIFE 103 

in the article on "The Idealist Movement and Posi- 
tive Science : an Experience." This led up, in the 
notebook, to the first sketch of the final book here 
given, called by her "The Book of the Spiritual Life." 
It began with a study of the effect upon her of a 
return to the long service of Good Friday, and ended 
with the notes which were afterwards to be enlarged 
into the posthumous book. Alongside of these were 
notes on subjects seemingly different, but always 
brought into harmony with one another, and with her 
whole life, by the development of the same doctrine 
of duty. For example, when she wrote on Wesley, 
on account of his connection with Lincoln College, 
Lady Dilke brought round the story of his career to 
these words : " It is indeed only when the spiritual 
life has become in some shape or other a part of our 
own nature that we are able to appreciate all worldly 
good, riches, success, and authority, at their true 
value, as being what we may call things external, and, 
however desirable, yet not capable of giving that 
secret strength and satisfaction which we derive from 
any advance in holiness. Wherever men see a living 
manifestation of this strength, there we always find 
them ready to acknowledge a kingship, a right to bear 
sway over the wills and the affections of others." 

In the jumble of the notebook, ideas for addresses 
to women on the formation of their unions come 
between "Wesley" and jottings of "discussions with 
Cardinal Manning" about his books; but the bond of 
union may be discovered even in these cases. Lady 
Dilke quotes the statement that " Women do not care 
for causes but only for persons," and replies, " It is 
well to care for persons if you care for the right 
things in them. In loving what is right and beautiful 
in others, we come near to being right and beautiful 
ourselves." Between the entry "Leo XIII., — St. 
Thomas Aquinas," and another theological bit — also 



I04 MEMOIR 

part of the controversy with Manning — I find what 
seems to me an equally interesting note, intended for 
an address to students at an art college: "The high 
aim, the careful study, the strenuous effort and the 
sustained labour are a training for victor and van- 
quished alike." 

As a natural consequence of my preference for my 
wife's creative work over her labours of research, I 
pressed her, as our days grew shorter, to do that 
which few can do, rather than that which was the 
result of sustained effort. Lady Dilke always main- 
tained, on the contrary, that the wide view of art 
which, with her long years of work behind her, she 
could form and develop, had more claim on her best 
hours. The rest must be taken as it came— jotted 
down when she was in the humour. After the 
publication, however, of the four volumes on the 
eighteenth century, she recognized, in 1903, that she 
should never be able to undertake so considerable 
a task again, " Now," she said, " I shall be able to do 
more of the things you like." I liked them all, but, 
in saying so, gave the turn of the scale in favour of 
my own opinion, by pointing out that research meant 
hours of separation, while in contemplative study she 
was better able to be with those she loved. 

The discussion with Manning was one into which 
Lady Dilke was led rather by admiration for his 
personal charm than by reason of his authority as 
a theologian. She had seen a good deal of the 
Cardinal in connection with her trade-union work, 
concerning which there had been a rumour of re- 
sistance on the part of some of those with whom he 
had much influence. Their objection — if it existed — 
he removed, and he co-operated actively with Lady 
Dilke in her trade-union work during the last years 
of his life. Discussions on her earlier Puseyism, 
later Positivism, and, lastly, her opinions at the time, 



CARDINAL MANNING 105 

followed, and in May, 1887, Cardinal Manning gave 
her, and asked her to read, his book of 1865 on " The 
Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost." She did so, 
but, after reading, she proceeded to write on the 
considerations which it aroused in her mind. These 
exhibit rather the fighting attitude of Lady Dilke 
than the " Universalism," to use an American term, 
which she really taught. There was no possibility 
of agreement on theological questions between two 
minds so variously constituted as Manning's and my 
wife's. After contrasting his position with that of St. 
Thomas Aquinas, who, though quoted by Leo XIII. 
in an " Encyclical," had not, she showed, really main- 
tained the same teaching, she summed up in her 
notebook the logical claim of the Church "over 
education, over the Press, over life and property, 
over law " : this she naturally rejected. 

When the Cardinal died, Lady Dilke wrote an 
interesting letter to one of his biographers. In 
dealing with the action of the Cardinal towards the 
dockers' strike, she jotted down some notes on " the 
image of the Cardinal's being and doing, in what I 
think was perhaps the most complete episode in his 
life. It is the one passage in which we find his 
immense gift of human sympathy fulfilling itself, 
uncontradicted by the conditions of the work he had 
in hand. . . . His first movement was always noble, 
but it was unreasoning, and he had a painful distrust 
of 'unreasoned' impulse. His reason was keen, and 
appreciated at their highest value all the maxims of 
worldly experience. Sometimes it was as if — in fear 
of being overcome by his own emotions — he took 
refuge in the calculation of pure worldly wisdom — in 
its first expression almost cynical, but always finally 
clothed in language of a high morality. If his 
impulses took him counter to strong social prejudices, 
he instinctively shrank before them." 



io6 MEMOIR 

Manning's anguish at human suffering, she said, 
was developed " in a degree that I have known in 
hardly any other man. I have heard him speak with 
a sound in his voice and a light in his eyes which 
meant depth of restrained passion. * Give all your- 
self to London ; it is the abomination of desolation.' 
' No one knows the depth of the sufferings of women, 
save the doctor or the priest.' That he was so pained 
by your pain was the chief of his powers. He never 
could have been a great doctor of the Church, — a 
great theologian, — for his metaphysics were of the 
weakest; but his brilliant understanding and un- 
rivalled practical instinct, couf)led with this passionate 
capacity for feeling, made him one of the striking 
personalities I have known." 

On the other hand. Lady Dilke noted at the same 
time, not only that it was true, as had been written, 
that when he interfered in the dockers' strike he 
knew little as to the rights of the struggle, but even 
that "he never came to a clear idea of the broad 
issues of trade unionism, although he put his name 
on our committee in 1887, in order, he said, to 
strengthen my hands in dealing with his girls." 

With the exception that he wrote once to her in 
congratulation on my acceptance of the candidature 
for Dean Forest, in 1891, the Cardinal did not corre- 
spond with Lady Dilke directly, so far as 1 know, 
after 1888; but in the great number of letters which 
he wrote to me about various matters, between 
February, 1889, and February, 1891, there is always 
a message for his metaphysical antagonist, and 
often very touching words intended for her, though 
generally in the form "you both." When Manning 
died, his niece, who was a member of the Women's 
Trade Union League, in writing to Lady Dilke, 
conveyed to her, in Manning's latest words, his 
appreciation of her " very great work " for women. 



INDIA 107 

Our Indian journey produced the publication, in 
the Fortnightly Reviciv, by Lady Dilke, of an article on 
the missionaries in India as observed by her in her 
two visits. The actual cause of the article was a con- 
tribution by Canon Taylor to the number (October, 
1888) of the Fortnightly Revieiv which had appeared 
immediately before we started. In her article Lady 
Dilke incidentally described her visit to the Golden 
Temple at Amritsar, in a little passage which is one 
of her best, and of which an echo will be found in her 
" Book of the Spiritual Life " contained in this volume. 
Lady Dilke was attacked by a writer in the Methodist 
Times because she stated that a missionary and his 
wife who visited this temple with her had carefully 
complied with the customary signs of reverence. On 
this she noted for herself, "To follow contrary courses 
would be to provoke an Indian rising. Would that 
advance the causes which my critic had at heart? 
Apparently he did not shrink even from this awful 
consequence, . , . ' Christ came not to bring peace 
but a sword.' " 

Along with the general notebook, which contains, 
as has been said, some labour notes. Lady Dilke has 
left also a women's trade-union notebook in her hand- 
writing, not held secret like the other, but invariably 
placed at the disposal of those who worked with her. 
It was, I believe, familiar to her dear friend and secre- 
tary, Miss May Abraham, up to the time when that 
lady was appointed an Assistant Commissioner under 
the Labour Commission, and, then, an Inspector under 
the Home Office. It has also been used by my 
wife's niece, Miss Gertrude Tuckwell, since she took 
over the duties of Miss Abraham. In these notes 
there were laid down those principles of dealing 
with the labour of women working with their hands 
which have been universally endorsed by all who 
received them from her. The action of the Women's 



io8 MEMOIR 

Trade Union League in later times has in some 
respects differed from the teaching of the leading 
members of its committee in its earliest days under 
its first name ; but the gradual development which 
has led to close union with the great organizations of 
men-workers is one which was inevitable from the 
first. The triumphant success of the Lancashire 
organization of men and women workers in a single 
body was the example which has been thus fruitful. 

In her labour notebooks, Lady Dilke first took up 
the case of women in unskilled trades. Avoiding a 
sensationalism which was repulsive to her trained 
mind, she pointed out that from the dangerous trades, 
such as those of the white-lead workers and the match- 
makers, arose the call to all who valued womanhood 
to take their share in the improvement of conditions. 
It was impossible " to sit idly by . , . whilst the 
anguish of our working sisters and their little ones 
lifts its voice to Heaven. . . . They are crying to us 
for their redemption. The seal of death is on their 
lips." 

Our first long parting after our marriage — indeed, 
the longest which we ever knew — was during the 
Indian journey in November, 1888, when, after we had 
travelled from Karachi to Quetta with the Comman- 
der-in-Chief, she left me to complete with him his 
cold-weather tour along the frontier, while she went 
to Simla to stay with Lady Roberts until we could 
meet again at Lahore. In the autumn of 1889 there 
came another parting, which was to be annual from 
that year. She attended the Trade Congress, and 
finding that she could be useful there to the cause 
which she had at heart, she decided to go each year, 
and in this way to meet those labour leaders who in- 
cluded women in their unions. For sixteen years 
she regularly attended the Trade Congress in Sep- 
tember, up to and including September, 1904 — the 



TRADE CONGRESS 109 

month before her death. As we were almost always 
together, it is only of Trade Congress week each year 
that I have Lady Dilke's letters to myself— letters 
which show that the doctrines of the notebook were 
well taught, and that the effect produced was that 
which has been described by Miss Constance Hinton 
Smith, of the Christian Social Union, and other writers 
who penned obituary notices of Lady Dilke for the 
Women's Trade Union Review. In September, 1889, 
during her visit on this work to Scotland, I had gone 
to Germany to pay a long-promised visit to Prince 
Bismarck, still at that time Chancellor, at Friedrichs- 
ruh. Lady Dilke was ill ; the strain of having to speak 
in public was always beyond her strength, but she 
never allowed her suffering to interfere with what 
she knew was a necessary effort. After her first 
public meetings at Dundee and elsewhere, she wrote, 
" The Scotch seem to be a madly enthusiastic people." 
To judge by the accounts of her speeches in the Scotch 
papers, it was their power and her charm which pro- 
duced the enthusiasm that so surprised her. A 
spectator at one of her meetings wrote as follows : — 

" Lady Dilke's success in Dundee in touching the 
hearts of the women of the people was remarkable. 
The mill lasses trooped to the platform at the con- 
clusion of a meeting to shake hands with her; they 
crowded round her to pour their uncouth blessings 
on her head ; and many toil-worn faces softened and 
old eyes filled with tears at some heart-touching 
incident or moving appeal sent home by the magic 
of a sweet womanly voice winged with earnestness." 
Lady Dilke's voice was of singular beauty, and re- 
mained throughout life unchanged in softness and 
in volume. Her writing was seldom simple, but her 
speech rested for its effect on simplicity and on charm 
of voice and utterance. 

In the spring of 1890 Lady Dilke went to 



no MEMOIR 

Newcastle to speak on the white-lead trade, and in this 
matter, as in that of the match-making industry, her 
efforts achieved complete success. At Newcastle she 
was able to quote one of her earliest speeches at 
Oxford, when she had said, " I look forward to the 
day when a union shall be the paramount authority 
in its trade, — able, indeed, to command but willing to 
help, to educate, to hold enlightened councils, to teach 
the laws of society and nature, ... to husband the 
magnificent forces of our workers, women and men." 
She now pointed to the work that had already been 
accomplished in fourteen years. 

At Newcastle she was in the constituency of her 
lifelong friend Mr. John Morley, who had succeeded 
my brother in its representation. He was said to 
have expressed a doubt as to the wisdom of fighting 
against the inexorable laws of political economy. 
Lady Dilke pointed out the inapplicability of those 
" laws," as usually taught, to the situation in the 
dangerous trades. After describing how things still 
were at that moment — now happily so no longer — at 
Newcastle and at Sheffield, she went on, " There are 
those who tell us that these evils are not for us to 
touch, that our attempts to hinder them are quackery. 
. . . If we are indeed to 'leave them' . . . we leave 
them to be dealt with by a Higher Power at the last — 
they are left even to the just judgment of God." She 
appealed to the women : " It is a sacred call. Listen, 
I beseech you, if not for yourselves, for the sake of 
your husbands, your children, the little ones yet un- 
born. You love your babies. Do you wish them to 
suffer as you have done ? If not, then remember 
organization is salvation. Stand forth and do battle 
in the ranks of labour, along with the men who are 
stretching out their hands to you." 

During this tour Lady Dilke was criticized by a 
powerful newspaper, to which she replied, in a letter 



WOMEN^S TRADE UNIONS m 

dated from Glasgow on March 8, 1890: "Nothing 
could be so foreign to my sympathies as to engage 
in any 'operations' which might tend to a 'war of 
supremacy between the sexes.' I am of the old- 
fashioned belief that the ideal place for a woman is 
her home ; that while the man goes forth to work, her 
task should be the making of that home holy and 
blessed to all that dwell with her. But our women 
to-day must stand to be hired ; we can't stop their 
working, so it seems to me that, in answer to the 
men's appeal, it is our duty to see that our sisters 
work with as much benefit to themselves and as little 
injury to others as possible." 

The most difficult piece of management which 
Lady Dilke had to undertake in connection with her 
trade-union work was at Belfast, in 1893 and other 
years. She wrote to me from Belfast on September 
II, 1893, telling me that we must both be prepared 
for " further sacrifice," meaning postponement of the 
date of meeting again at our Pyrford home. " I fear 
now it must be Thursday before I start. I must work 
at the organizing committee. Thursday will be my 
first possible day. I mean to keep all October for 
Pyrford. The situation here is that some who dis- 
like trade-union methods contrived cleverly to con- 
fuse trade unionism and Home Rule in the eyes of 
a portion of their workpeople, while others played 
into their hands by holding Sunday meetings. The 
cry has been 'Trade Unionist equals Home Ruler 
plus Atheist ' " . . . It is partly, I think, an effect 
of her conciliatory methods that Irish trade unionists 
who are Orangemen, and others who are equally ardent 
members of the Church of the Irish majority, are now 
able to take part together in labour meetings through- 
out Ireland, without a trace of religious prejudice 
being discernible in the proceedings. 

In a later speech on trade unionism. Lady Dilke 



112 MEMOIR 

struck a note which produced an amazing effect. 
"The day once was when men took the Cross and 
went forth from home and all the joys of life, that 
they might deliver the Sacred City. There is a call 
to us now to take the Cross and deliver the bodies 
and souls of our brothers and sisters. This is the 
object of that new crusade. The name of trade 
unionist, which once was a name of shame, is the 
name of soldiers of labour, who are fighting to pre- 
serve to the nation all that is noble in human life. 
They are fighting to deliver the sacred city of the 
spirit from captivity to the heathenish conditions of 
modern industry. How shall men be men, or women 
women ; nay, how shall children be children amongst 
us in this our day, if they be ground down to earth 
by sorrow ! " 

At Manchester, later, with the Bishop (Dr. Moor- 
house) in the chair, and in other places. Lady Dilke 
appealed to what she called the aristocracy of 
employers. She pointed out why it was that she 
blamed well-to-do women if they stood aside from 
the movement for organization of working women, 
merely because in their own manufactories, or in their 
own trade, the conditions of labour were good. " Of 
course to join us in this work means some self-sacrifice, 
sacrifice of leisure," at the least. " Can any joy that 
we may win for ourselves equal the joy of knowing 
that by our efforts we have brought the feeble, the 
ignorant, and the lonely to feel that they are not 
alone?" 

Lady Dilke invariably preached to those who 
desired to help her that they first must "learn." " If 
we try to help without knowledge, all our labour will 
be vain, and will only bring forth trouble." Quoting, 
too, in one of her addresses some beautiful words of 
pity for affliction, she wrote that they "bring before 
us, as it were, a vision of the perfect life. It would 



THE CAUSE OF WORKING WOMEN 113 

be a bond between us if every member, girl or woman, 
would try with me just once in the day of worldly 
labour to call to mind these words." 

All sound trade unionists, working with the best 
of the leaders of the great unions, have a horror of 
resort to strikes ; but lock-outs occur from time to 
time and strikes may be necessary. When there 
could be no doubt, and responsible leaders felt that 
there was no alternative, it was, she thought, the 
duty of all who could to learn the facts, and the 
duty of those who knew them to help to the utmost 
of their power. Those who bore the brunt were 
" martyrs, without the honours of martyrdom . . . 
fighting the cause of the unborn who were to come 
after them, the cause of national greatness, insepa- 
rably bound up with the power of the people to lead 
free, and large, and honourable lives." In such cases 
" people talked of how wide were the channels through 
which the sympathy of the public flowed . . . the pity 
of it was how narrow they were : how few seemed 
to understand what was at stake." 

The advice of Lady Dilke was often sought, in 
later years, by those who, in the United States, in 
Australia, in Germany, and in Austria, desired to take 
action for the benefit of working women similar to 
her own. From Berlin and from the United States 
there visited us devoted women who had " come 
out" — to use the American phrase — from the pro- 
fessional classes or from among the capitalists, to 
devote themselves to the woman's cause. In a series 
of letters from Berlin addressed to Lady Dilke by 
two different correspondents, strong testimony is 
borne, by competent persons, to the international 
value of her work. The invitation from the Berlin 
Committee of the International Women's Congress, 
which was held at Berlin in 1896, after stating their 
, appreciation of " the known value and width of your 

Q 



114 MEMOIR 

social work," goes on, "We worship the energy by 
which you help to lead, through hard difficulty, these 
organizations." The secretary adds that no one so 
well as Lady Dilke could show to German ladies how 
it was possible for a woman of high cultivation to 
overflow with sympathy towards working women. 
" You cannot know how precious your presence 
would be for all German women." Lady Dilke never 
went to an International Congress, and it was on her 
motion that the committee of the Women's Trade 
Union League always deputed one of the other 
members to represent them. The Berlin Committee 
answered her refusal by begging leave to be allowed 
to publish a translation of her letter, and were polite 
enough to accept the admirable representative of the 
committee : " We are very glad to get the good, not 
being able to get the best." Another of these German 
ladies, who had been over to see Lady Dilke, wrote 
that she had never forgotten what she had been told, 
but had observed it in her own life, and was good 
enough to say that the first and chief thing she had 
learnt was " the beautiful courage by which you are 
what we all want to be." 

Appreciation of Lady Dilke's efforts on behalf of 
labour was continuous from the representatives of 
the great trade unions, and she was often called 
upon to open the Textile Halls, constructed in 
Lancashire by the efforts of the unions composed of 
men and women workers. In 1899 she received an 
address from the American Federation of Labour, 
signed by the president, the well-known Samuel 
Gompers, who wrote that the committee had added 
to their report closing words commending the work 
of Lady Dilke and "her example to the women of 
America for emulation." 

In her labour work, between the early years of 
our married life and 1892, my wife had the devoted 



PHILOSOPHY OF TRADE UNIONISM 115 

assistance of the first of the secretaries who worked 
with her, Miss May Abraham. Mrs. H. J. Tennant, as 
she now is, has let me see a long letter of April 9, 1893, 
in which Lady Dilke tried to leave her free to make the 
best choice for her own future working life. " Hardly 
a day passes in which I do not say, ' If only she were 
here ! ' Yet I shrink from the possibility of your 
making the sacrifice of a brilliant and useful career 
out of tenderness to me. . . . The tie . . . cannot be 
weakened, even if that decision prevented your coming 
back to me." Miss May Abraham rightly went to the 
Home Office, and " the tie " remained in all its strength. 

Lady Dilke never pretended that, in the distant 
future, trade unionism would be sufficient to redress 
all ills, and wrote "not gospel of the future, but 
salvation at present." In a later visit to Dundee in 
September, 1896, she explained the idea: "The life 
of any great movement such as this for the salvation 
of the worker is like the life of man. It bears in its 
breast from the very beginning the seed of decay. I 
expect that by-and-by trade unionism will finish its 
work, but it is very far from having finished its 
perfected work." 

The most interesting of the whole series of her 
labour speeches was, perhaps, that at Bristol in 1898, 
which contained this passage : " Emma Paterson was 
so profoundly convinced of the appalling misery 
and dumb suffering prevalent in the lives of work- 
ing women, that she sacrificed all she had to 
acquire information as to the possibility of trade 
unions among women. When she had no more to 
give she gave her life. She died, under our eyes, of 
the work she did for working women." Then there 
followed an account of early mistakes on the part of 
the League, and of their nature, previously described. 
Lady Dilke went on: "The cause of labour is one; 
it is suicide to put sex against sex. . . . The men 



ii6 MEMOIR 

were afraid that, if they recognized the labour of 
women and organized it, this would tend to lower the 
wages of men. . . . Years have brought wisdom. . . . 
All of us recognize that women are utterly helpless 
to protect themselves, but are desperately powerful 
to injure others. . . . We reversed the policy of the 
League, and called the men to our aid." In her 
last speech upon the subject, at Leeds, September 
7, 1904, at the People's Hall, under the chairman- 
ship of the President of the Trade Congress, Lady 
Dilke returned to the same point. Her theme 
on this occasion was, as it had been for twenty 
years, "Labour is of no sex, men and women must 
fight in the same ranks. Whatever may have been 
the case in the distant past, when the men may have 
done a wrong, redeemed by their present attitude, 
the men trade unionists are now our best helpers 
in this work." 

All this time Lady Dilke continued to combine her 
two apparently distinct spheres of activity — distinct 
only to the public, for there were those who knew 
that the two lives were one. Between the publi- 
cation, in 1891, of "The Shrine of Love" and the 
appearance at the end of 1899 of the first of the four 
volumes of her great book on the eighteenth century. 
Lady Dilke published no writings except in the 
periodic press. She had written on Benefit Societies 
in the Fortnightly for June, 1889, and two articles on 
trade unionism, in 1890. These were followed by 
another for the Fortnightly in May, 1891, and one for 
the North American Review in 1892. She wrote also an 
article on the Labour Department of the Board of 
Trade, and contributed the preface to a book on 
Woman's Work, which is still in some demand. Her 
annual review of the Prussian "Jahrbuch," which was 
to be, in the case of 1904, her last published writing, 
other than that which appears posthumously in this 







WORKING NOTES FOR " L'ETENDARD DU 3E CUIRASSIER." 

[To face p. 117. 



INGRES 117 

volume, of course went on. She also began to publish 
separate articles which would have formed part of 
a future book on the French art of the nineteenth 
century, towards which, indeed, she had been working 
throughout her life. 

Her long-continued art studies produced a great 
mass of working sketches of pictures and sculpture. 
One example is given in this volume. In the draw- 
ings of sculpture there would be three little indica- 
tions of its shape and "movement" taken from three 
points. As an example of the pains she took I would 
mention Ingres. So far as I know, she never wrote 
on Ingres, yet I find notes upon almost every picture 
by him and on his fresco at Dampierre, with thumb- 
nail sketches from which the composition can be 
studied. These stood ready "to be written" when 
they might be needed, perhaps only for that " last 
book " which she hardly expected to complete. 

An article on Detaille, involving criticism also 
of Meissonier and of De Neuville, appeared in the 
Cosmopolitan of September, 1891. To the Art Journal 
she contributed, besides the Caldecott series which 
has been named, a paper on Christophe, the sculptor, 
which was a labour of love. From 1898 she began to 
\yrite regularly for La Gazette des Beaux Arts, and a 
list of her principal contributions to that valuable 
review may be found in the obituary notice. It was 
by M. de Nolhac, the distinguished poet, curator of 
Versailles, and writer upon Erasmus, upon Petrarch, 
and upon Marie Antoinette, and appeared in the 
number bearing date December i, 1904. 

Several of the principal miscellaneous writings of 
Lady Dilke, which were published in the later period 
now reached, have been mentioned ; for example, that 
on the Idealist movement, and that on the Georgia 
Loyalists, in the Transactions of the United Empire 
Loyalists Association for 1899-1900. The article. 



ii8 MEMOIR 

"The Idealist Movement and Positive Science: an 
Experience," the forerunner of the posthumous bool<; 
which stands next to this Memoir in the present 
volume, led to a large correspondence with philo- 
sophers and divines, to whom its pages had appealed. 
One of Lady Dilke's French friends, writing about 
her own husband, added of the paper in which "An 
Experience" was related, that it had come "both 
from your rare intelligence and also from your great 
heart." " Cest toujours par la, surtout quand ce 
coeur a ete meurtri et n'a pas defailli, que nous arri- 
vons aux choses cachees." 

The success of Lady Dilke's volumes on the French 
art of the eighteenth century has been so recent and 
so considerable that it is unnecessary to do more 
than chronicle the appearance of the volume on 
"Painters" in the late autumn of 1899, "Architects 
and Sculptors " a year later, and " Decoration and 
Furniture " in December, 1901. The French criticisms 
in France were as favourable as were the British 
criticisms on this side of the Channel. A great 
French official wrote upon the Decoration volume : 
" Le magnifique monument que vous elevez a I'hon- 
neur de notre art, s'est eleve d'une assise nouvelle, 
Ici, vous n'aviez ni devancier ni guide, et I'originalite 
de vos recherches s'affirme avec une puissance plus 
grande que jamais. . . . Je vous remercie, comme 
Frangais, de faire entrer dans la grande histoire 
I'ceuvre de tant de nos artistes dedaignes par elle." 
Eugene Muntz had written of the second volume, 
"Architects and Sculptors," at the end of 1900, "II 
etait reserve a une etrangere de relever ces etudes, 
tombees si bas dans notre pays." One result of the 
triumph of the third volume, " Decoration and Furni- 
ture," was seen in the increased amount offered to 
Lady Dilke for her future writings. She was more 
pleased by this practical appreciation of her success 



EXEGI MONUMENTUM 119 

than she had been pleased by praise. She felt at last 
that even as regarded England she was not writing 
"things that people do not want." After contributing 
an introduction, which appeared in 1903, to the big 
French and English book on the Wallace collection, 
she formally communicated to me, with a certain 
pride, her intention to " put up my prices," and 
indeed told me the high figure at which she had now 
set them. 

The fourth and last volume of the eighteenth-cen- 
tury book, " Engravers and Draughtsmen," appeared 
at Christmas, 1902. Many were the congratulations 
from high authorities which we received on the com- 
pletion of her eighteenth-century work. They live in 
my recollection : hardly any of them do I find kept : 
one from which I quote was retained for another pur- 
pose, as the letter deals in its latter part with some 
new drawings, which it was necessary for my wife to 
see. M. de Nolhac wrote from " Chateau de Versailles, 
Janvier 7, 1903 : — Que ce mot vous apporte I'expres- 
sion de mon admiration pour I'oeuvre si considerable 
et si neuve dont vous dotez la litterature d'art de 
I'Europe. Ce dernier volume vous permet d'ecrire 
VExegi vionumentum, et combien peu parmi nous en 
auront reve un comparable." 

One of the congratulations on the completion of 
the book was from Mr, Bodley, whose writing in 
private letters and in certain articles she had admired 
long before " France " brought it into fame. He wrote 
that, after the brilliant accomplishment of what he 
thought her lasting life-work, she might say with her 
old friend Renan, under similar circumstances : " Ainsi 
mon principal devoir est accompli. Tout cela me 
cause une grande satisfaction interieure ; et voila ce 
qui m'a fait croire qu'apres avoir paye presque toutes 
mes dettes, je pouvais bien m'amuser un peu." Lady 
Dilke's ideas of amusement were like those of Renan, 



I20 MEMOIR 

in so far as the holiday she contemplated meant a 
period of new work in a different line. Although her 
genius widely differed from that of Renan both in its 
character and in its expression, she resembled him in 
two particulars. Lady Dilke had a power of work 
which, even in a strong man, would merit the epithet 
of Benedictine, applied to it by me ; while in her social 
hours she gave the impression of having no other pre- 
occupation than that of enjoying the pleasant side of 
life, and of communicating to others her light-hearted- 
ness. Mr. Bodley, writing after her death, says on 
the same subject : " She had a remarkable faculty of 
divesting herself of all trace of her working existence. 
Notably, her exterior aspect was not that which is 
popularly associated with the blue-stocking, still less 
with the feminine orator. One portion only of her 
laborious studies was reflected in her outward guise. 
She was the best-dressed Englishwoman I have ever 
known. In her attire she seemed to impart a remi- 
niscence of the canvases of Boucher and of Van Loo, 
which she had celebrated as the types of that Grand 
Sieclewhen the highest forms of feminine intelligence 
were not divorced from exterior signs of feminine 
grace." 

On our return from our annual visit to Paris, which 
had been lengthened since I had sold my house at 
Toulon, my wife set to work on mapping out her future. 

It was Lady Dilke's intention, in 1903, to give more 
time to her friends, and, by her medical attendant's 
direction, to rest. The Indian typhoid fever, when it 
took away the arthritis of her earlier years, left a 
tendency to the breaking of blood-vessels in all parts 
of the body — which was aggravated by cold, heat, or 
overwork of body or mind. It was not until about 
the time that she had brought out the fourth and last 
of the eighteenth-century volumes that she recognized 
the fact that she had been overworking throughout 



UNACCOMPLISHED PLANS 121 

her life, and that to continue to overtax her strength 
was dangerous. She decided that in future she would 
make but two speeches in the year and otherwise 
conduct her labour work in private. She had taken 
the chair of the committee of the Women's Trade 
Union League, and to the duties of that position she 
would attend, but chiefly by quiet presence and by 
writing. As regarded the art side of her activity, she 
determined to obey medical orders by resting twice 
in every day, and, subject to this arrangement for 
slower work, to give the first place to the volume 
on the seventeenth century. Her idea was to popu- 
larize her favourite among her volumes — "Art in the 
Modern State." 

On the seventeenth-century book she was working 
steadily, and it was half ready when she died. There 
was also an intention to bring out a fuller and better- 
illustrated edition of the " Renaissance," and in addi- 
tion to write on the woodcuts of the early Lyons press. 
Towards the new volume of stories a good deal had 
been done. The last book of her lifetime she had 
meant to be a volume which doubtless would have 
developed the philosophy of the future relations of 
democracy to art, as the book on the seventeenth 
century surveyed the relation of art to the centralized 
monarchic state. Lady Dilke, however, had grave 
doubts as to whether she was likely to assert her 
family longevity, and live to complete her nineteenth- 
century book. As an alternative, she had from time 
to time before her the suggestion of a book upon the 
artists whom she had known, into which she might 
have woven her nineteenth-century notes. She has 
left two sets of papers which may have been meant 
as preface and introduction to the nineteenth-century 
work. The doctrine taught in them is that the irre- 
sistible development of democracy is the keystone of 
the modern situation. To fight against the social 

R 



122 MEMOIR 

movement, she argued, is irrational, inasmuch as it 
is but an inevitable historical evolution. The Re- 
naissance had "transferred art from the service of 
religion to that of the Prince — an idealized concep- 
tion of man." It had "formed the bridge needed to 
cross the gulf between faith in the unknown and 
service to the known." Democracy "needs service 
and devotion to the race everywhere, in all time, 
under all conditions. ... To the Greek, certain types 
only were worth the full honour of perfect expression. 
To the modern artist all forms of life are sacred." 

Our last happy visit to Paris together had been 
that of December, 1903, when we saw all our old 
friends of all our Paris circles. Some new friends 
were made, as, for instance, one lady who had been 
brought to meet us by M. Charles Ephrussi, on the 
ground that she had long carried about with her 
everywhere •" The Shrine of Death " and " The Shrine 
of Love." The gaiety of the meetings with Gaston 
Boissier and Bonnat had been as unrestrained as 
ever, and there had been the usual profit from the 
study of the prints under the care of M. Henri 
Bouchot, and of the drawings at the Louvre with 
M. Carl Dreyfus and the younger men. These have 
written, "Les visites au Louvre etaient pour nous 
un veritable plaisir, et nous nous rejouissions a la 
pensee de la revoir bientot." I ought to name, of a 
family for which Lady Dilke had much affection, the 
head, M. Gustave Dreyfus, a high authority on Dona- 
tello and on the Medallists of the Italian Renaissance, 
and owner of a beautiful collection, whose constant 
kindness in performing work for Lady Dilke in Paris 
is acknowledged by her in the prefaces of the 
" Painters " and the "Architects and Sculptors." 

After we had returned to Pyrford in January, 1904, 
the authorities of the proposed Exposition des Primi- 
tifs Fran9ais wrote to ask Lady Dilke to work for 



FINAL LABOURS 123 

them, and she decided that she would visit Paris ; 
thus making an unprecedented absence from London 
during the session of Parliament. She did so in the 
spring, but refused to see her friends in Paris, and 
confined herself to work. 

At Dockett Eddy, our Thames-side house, in the 
latter part of August, she was better than she had 
been in the previous year, and went through, with 
rather less fatigue than usual, the trying Trade Con- 
gress week. Miss Constance Hinton Smith, of the 
Women's Trade Union League, has written in their 
Review : " Only a few weeks before the end came so 
suddenly, although . . . compelled by medical orders 
to lay aside employment and recreation she held dear, 
she voluntarily incurred the great strain and fatigue 
of attending at the Leeds Trade Congress. That 
week's labour was her last blow struck for the work- 
ing woman's cause." We met again as usual at Speech 
House, in Dean Forest, for our September stay in 
West Gloucestershire among my constituents. Our 
party there consisted of my wife's dear friend. Miss 
Monck — our constant companion in our rides — my 
wife's sister, Mrs. Tuckwell, with her husband, their 
daughter Gertrude, and my secretary, H. K. Hudson.* 
It was the impression of us all, repeatedly referred to 
in general conversation by us at the time, that we 
had never known my wife so bright, so gay. At the 
end of the Speech House visit Lady Dilke repeatedly 
told us that she "never had been so happy" in her 
life, but added — as she did in several letters — that 
she was in need of rest, and was " going to Pyrford 
for a long rest." We reached Pyrford on the night 
of Saturday, October 15. I had asked her to see her 
medical attendant on that day, as was usual on her 

* Mr. Hudson is now acting as my wife's executor, with our friend 
Mr. Reginald McKenna, M.P., who has also helped me greatly with 
this Memoir. 



124 MEMOIR 

return, but she said, " I can't; he would stop my going 
up with you on Thursday, and I want to go. I think 
I ought to be there." This was for a meeting at 
Chelsea Town Hall, at which I was to make the prin- 
cipal speech. On Thursday morning, October 20, 
we travelled up to London, my wife seemingly quite 
well. In the afternoon, Mrs. Arnold-Forster, who 
since early girlhood had been an intimate and dear 
friend, came to see her by appointment, as they 
had not met for some time. This was the last quiet 
talk Lady Dilke had with any one but myself, and I 
have Mrs. Arnold-Forster's leave to use some words 
which she wrote to me about their conversation. 
"... You had come to the door of her room and we 
had talked a little, and then you went back to the 
other room, and I turned to her to see — as I had so 
often seen before— the light that lit up her face, the 
light that your coming in and going out and speaking 
of you brought to it. She looked so wonderfully and 
radiantly happy that day. I said to her once or twice 
while I was with her, ' How happy you are ! ' and she 
said, 'Oh, things are well with me now.' She had 
spoken with gladness of your being well, looking 
stronger. . . . Then she told me of her work in the 
autumn and spoke of the Women's Trade Union 
League and of her progress with her book, of what 
she was going to do for it in Paris, of its illustrations, 
and she made a rough reckoning of how many weeks 
would see her ' through the book.' Then she spoke 
to me of a long talk we had had at Dockett, when I 
had run to her for a night in August to be rested and 
helped. . . . Then I said, ' I go away so happy ; it 
has done me good to see your dear face looking so 
happy,' and she said again, 'Oh, I am happy, I am 
happy,' and that was the last. So every memory of 
that day is happiness, and by degrees it comforts one, 
and your picture of Sunday is beautiful. I love to 



THE LAST ILLNESS 125 

think of that joy to the end, and nothing to overcloud 
or to throw a shadow." 

At Chelsea on the night of Thursday, the 20th, 
Lady Dilke talked with many of her old acquaintances, 
and with a few friends, who had come to the meeting 
only to see her, some of them not being in sympathy 
with its objects. On the morning of Friday, the 21st, 
when I went in to her with her maid at the usual time, 
she said, " I am very ill ; I almost thought I would 
come in to your room, but just as I was making up 
m}'' mind to do so you put out your light, and I would 
not wake you." She insisted, however, on going down 
to Pyrford, as " in London " she said she " could not 
rest." Before lunch she got ready in her travelling 
clothes, and sat gazing into the fire — frightened — the 
only time. As soon as I was able to start — for she 
would not let me put off some work — we went to 
Waterloo, where she had much difficulty in stagger- 
ing along the platform with my help ; but in the train 
and at the end of our railway journey she seemed 
better. On reaching Pyrford she went to bed, and 
her doctor came. On leaving her he said to me, 
" Lady Dilke has a good deal of fever ; I will come 
in to-morrow morning." I begged her to let me send 
for a nurse, but she would not, though she consented 
— for the first time in our life together — to let her 
maid sleep in her room. On the morning of Saturday, 
October 22, she seemed much better. Dr. Thorne- 
Thorne then told us both that the examination which 
he had now been able to make — the fever having 
subsided — showed that she had broken a small blood- 
vessel on Thursday night, but he thought that in a 
week she might be well. 

On Saturday afternoon Miss Graham, a dear friend, 
came from Windsor, by an appointment made some 
days before, to take tea. My wife saw her with me, 
but was not well enough to talk. Miss Graham 



126 MEMOIR 

writes : '' I stood by the bed holding her hand, and 
saying I hoped to return and have tea with her the 
next week. She answered, ' Don't go away, go and 
have tea with Charles, and then come back and see 
me.' ... I thought she had a far-off look in her 
eyes, but it did not then cross my mind that she was 
in danger. ... I left, feeling rather uneasy, but far 
from realizing that it was the last sight on earth of 
one whose friendship I greatly valued, and for whose 
powers of mind and character I had a true admira- 
tion." Miss Graham was the last person from outside 
that my wife saw, and there was no one that she more 
gladly would have wished to have with her at such a 
moment, had she known. 

On Sunday afternoon, October 23, my wife was as 
bright as possible. She looked at her letters, noticing 
especially one from the Marquis Ito, from Tokio, 
which thanked her for what she had been able to do 
for the Japanese wounded, and widows and orphans. 
She had with her on her bed two letters which had 
come from our old friend M. Jusserand, French Am- 
bassador at Washington, partly about his last book, 
which I was reading by her bedside. I fetched for 
her some books of reference relating to tapestry, 
and pencil and paper, and she jotted down notes on 
some tapestries which had been shown her by Sir 
William and Lady Wedderburn at Meredith ten days 
earlier. 

The impression of the whole afternoon, while her 
maid and I sat with her, was that she was on the high 
road to recovery. On Sunday night at seven she 
again ceased to be free from all discomfort, but at 
nine insisted that I should go to bed, and that her 
maid should lie down in her room. At half-past ten 
I was called ; she had not spoken since she bade me 
good night. She had become unconscious, and did not 
speak again, I sent a groom on horseback for Dr. 



THE END 127 

Thorne-Thorne the moment I was called. It was not 
till after midnight that we began to believe that there 
was serious danger, and never at any one moment did 
we become sure that life was gone. At half-past 
twelve at night, when Monday, October 24, had just 
begun, the doctor came, and after some time told us 
that she was dead. 



It is a hard task even to chronicle the mere events 
of so varied a career. I have done my best with a 
difficult undertaking, for it seemed to me that the 
memoir could only be written by myself My wife 
had two sides to her intellectual life, and three diverse 
kinds of friends. I alone shared both lives and knew 
all the friends, and thus of necessity the duty has 
fallen upon me. 

The " Benedictine," working always and every- 
where, was understood by a few men in England and 
by a larger art-world abroad. One of these English- 
men writes to me, " Every fact was verified, no matter 
what time and pains it needed." Even these judges 
were not acquainted with the labour during the last 
thirty years of her life, accomplished by one who was 
the practical director of a considerable social move- 
ment. They knew not the extent to which this second 
side of her life had been developed, without inter- 
fering, however, with the activity and completeness 
of the first. 

Of the imperfection of the picture drawn by my hand 
I make no doubt. As the Marquise de Sassenay, in 
the name of those personal friends who were uncon- 
nected with either the art studies or the labour work, 
wrote to me, "Jamais personne ne dira assez ce 
qu'elle etait : elle avait tout — beaute, bonte de coeur, 
haute intelligence, simplicite. Comment ne pas cherir 
cette femme d'elite si absolument complete et unique." 



128 MEMOIR 

The last time my wife was ill enough for it to be 
known, another of her great friends had written to 
her, in a letter which till her death 1 had not seen, 
" Nous autres femmes nous avons tant besoin de forces 
pour suffire au double fardeau, de notre tache, et de 
celle de notre mari, Vous vous etes depensee a cette 
mission plus qu'aucune autre." The writer mentioned 
also the combination of activity in noble pursuits and 
courage which never knew fatigue. Throughout the 
posthumous book which follows will be recognized 
the two main characteristics of the life — an over- 
mastering sense of duty, and an unfailing courage, 
little short of sublime. 



END OF THE MEMOIR 



THE BOOK OF THE 
SPIRITUAL LIFE 



I 




I'll'iii l/ir hl,<:i Ijlioloilriipll lakTIl Sepl l!H' !■ 



THE BOOK 

OF 



THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 



(ADDITIONS BY THE EDITOR, MOSTLY TAKEN FROM NOTES 
FOUND WITHIN THE MANUSCRIPT PAGES, ARE MARKED *). 



AD SAPIENTES QUI SENTIUNT 
MECUM 

I have loved to hear my Lord spoken of; and 
wherever I have seen the print of his shoe in the earth, 
there I have coveted to set my foot too. 

* For all that you may know, none will like you 
the better; but in knowing you must find your own 
joy — Labour ! 

* Thy travel here has been with difficulty ; but that 
will make thy Rest the sweeter. 



^33 



CONTENTS 



HAGE 



TO THE READER 

OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 143 

OF LOVE AND SORROW 157 

OF PRAYER AND PRAISE 171 

OF LABOUR AND OF LEARNING 185 

OF THE HILLS AND PLAINS 203 

OF THE WOODS AND FIELDS 217 



^35 



TO THE READER 



TO THE READER 

The lamp of life lights our way to death. The 
more keenly we pursue our aims, the more 
swiftly we exhaust the little measure of oil that 
feeds the flame shining in our darkness. We 
are free, like the Phenix, but to choose the mate- 
rials of which we will build our funeral pyre. 
"Li Fenix," says the fable, "quiert la busche et 
le sarment par quoi il s'art et giete fors de vie." 
So, do we carry, with sure approach to the end, 
the burden of each day's hopes and fears, count- 
ing the steps by which we have come nearer to 
the fulfilment of our heart's desire. For most 
of us, as the years pass, take some definite view 
of our own lives ; of our relation to the lives of 
others, and of the objects which seem to us 
most worthy of accomplishment. 

139 T 2 



I40 TO THE READER 

No one has done this with more compre- 
hensive breadth, with more loving and prudent 
wisdom, or in more weighty and balanced 
words, than Chaucer, in that " Balade de bon 
conseyl," which I here quote, because it sums 
up the whole faith and belief of the writer of 
this little book. To be greedy neither of gold 
nor power ; to beware of the praise of men ; to 
be patient when wronged, knowing the caprice 
of fortune ; to accept contrary fates with cheer- 
ful courage and look beyond this earthly hour 
in the sure leading of the Spirit, — may bring 
us sorrow here, but also that deliverance which 
means peace at the last. 

Flee fro the prease, and dwelle with soothfastnesse, 
Suffyce unto thy good though it be small, 
For horde hath hate and climbing tickelnesse, 
Prease hath envye, and well is blent over all,* 
Savour no more than thee behove shall, 
Rede well thyself, that other folk canst rede, 
And trouth thee shall deliver, it is no drede. 

Paine thee not ech crooked to redresse, 
In trust of her that turneth as a ball, 
Great reste stant in little businesse. 
And eek beware to spurne against an awl, 

* Blind, everywhere. 



TO THE READER 141 

Strive not as doth the crocke with a wall, 
Daunte thyself that dauntest others deed, 
And trouth thee shall deliver, it is no drede. 

That thee is sent receive in buxomnesse, 

The wrastling of this world asketh a fall. 

Here is no home, here is but wildernesse, 

Forth pilgrim, forth ; forth, beast, out of thy stall, 

Know thy country, looke up, thanke God of all, 

Hold the hye way, and let thy ghost thee lede, 

And trouth thee shall deUver, it is no drede. 



OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 



1 



OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

"Omnis perfectio in hac vita quamdam imperfectionem sibi 
habet annexam; et omnis speculatio nostra quadam caligine 
non caret." 

The mediaeval legend of the Atonement bids 
men see in Christ crucified, the stolen apple 
of Life restored to the Tree of Knowledge 
by Death, wherein the Christian mystic has 
found an image of the path by which he may 
attain to spiritual knowledge. " O amare, O 
ire, O sibi perire, O ad Deum pervenire," are 
the words in which Saint Augustine sums up 
the supreme object of the Christian life, and 
they still speak to us of the solitary perfection 
of its aims and hopes. To love, that is to learn 
the Divine Charity ; to press forward beyond 
earthly barriers into the regions that eye hath 
not seen ; to die to the world so that we may 

145 u 



146 OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

live to God; — that is to-day, as it was yesterday, 
the strait way of the spiritual life. The un- 
tender wisdom of the East gives precept as 
unyielding : '* There is none in thy time whose 
friendship thou shouldest covet, nor any in- 
timate who, when fortune is treacherous, will 
be faithful. Live then apart, and rely upon 
no man." 

Souls, burning with desire of this perfec- 
tion, in their impatience of worldly conditions 
have sought death and the desert as the gate 
of life. Saint Simeon Stylites cries to us — 

" Three winters that my soul might grow to thee, 
I hved up there on yonder mountain side, 
My right leg chained into the crag, I lay 
Pent in a roofless close of ragged stones ; 

" Then, that I might be more alone with thee, 
Three years I lived upon a pillar high 
Six cubits, and three years on one of twelve ; 
And twice three years I crouch'd on one that rose 
Twenty by measure ; last of all I grew || 

Twice ten long weary, weary years to this, J 

That numbers forty cubits from the soil." ' 

The counsel of Chaucer points us to no 
such deadly isolation. When he bids " Flee fro 
the prease and dwelle with soothfastnesse " he 



THE DETACHED LIFE 147 

would fain have us seek in life the reconcile- 
ment of the spirit with the flesh : not by the 
selfish rejection of human ties and claims, but 
by the taking of such a course as may lead us 
on towards their mastery. To this end, he 
who would keep the direction of his own soul 
is counselled to avoid the great companies of 
those who are wholly absorbed by the business 
and pleasures of the world. Thereby he is 
told that he may win the governance of his 
own life in perfect dignity and peace. And 
this in truth is the strait gate leading to the 
way of the spiritual life, that a man shall count 
no sacrifice too great by the which he may 
purchase the controul of his own mind and 
take captive his thoughts, as they were 
prisoners held by him at the forfeit of a royal 
ransom. 

For such as they whose feet frequent the 
street and the market-place, whose desires are 
wholly towards the kingdoms of this world, 
the hour of meditation strikes in vain. How 
should he whose will is to the pursuit of for- 
tune, the winning of high estate or honour in 



148 OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

the eyes of men, whose blood is afire with the 
lust of conquest, enter into the knowledge of 
that sacred mood in which he may apprehend 
the secret influences of things, and set his im- 
agination free to receive impressions of those 
truths which cannot be mastered by the mere 
effort of reason ? Should a man, indeed, desire 
the leading of the Spirit, he must so number 
his days that there may be for him great spaces 
of solitude, in the hushed silences of which he 
may at least listen for some echo of the eternal 
voice. 

The temple of the life spiritual is closed to 
all such as seek its gates only in moments of dis- 
tress and danger. It demands from its votaries 
habitual constancy of service. In no other wise 
shall they come at that illumination in which 
they may apprehend regions of the world in- 
visible. Yet, by these regions and their mys- 
terious influences we are girt about, as is the 
land by the unfathomable sea, and the very 
roots of our being strike deep into the sources 
of their vital fires. 

What, indeed, is the life spiritual, but that 



THE PATH OF RENUNCIATION 149 

detached life of thought that brings with it 
increasing comprehension of the 

" One life within us and abroad 
Which meets all motion and becomes its soul." 

In its highest sense, it is the one means where- 
by we may come at some revelation of the true 
significance and mystery of the Christian dog- 
ma of the Incarnation and behold the triumph 
of the spirit over the flesh : that sovereign tri- 
umph not to be won without pain and sorrow 
and much labour, yet surely to be won by all 
those who will obey the commandment which 
Chaucer sums for us in the words — 

" Hold the hye wey,* and let thy ghost thee lede." 

This is a commandment not in any wise to 
be fulfilled save by the path of renunciation. In 
the clamorous crowd of everyday interests and 
occupations some moment must be held secure 
in which thought may take its lonely flight to- 
wards the unseen. He to whom the Valley of 
Vision has become as a familiar place knows 
the ecstasy of those moments in which our sense 

* Or, otherwise, " ^Veive thy lusts." 



I50 OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

of the reality of things that are eternal is quick- 
ened, and the facts of earthly existence and 
environment fall away and vanish. To such a 
one is given the mastery, for that which becomes 
to him true, certain, and sure — that which can 
enable him to stand free, even under shame, 
insult, and injury, so that these become of no 
account — is the clear vision of those things 
which never pass away. 

The Christian mystic rejoices in that every- 
where he is assured of the presence of that 
Eternal Power whom men name God ; that in 
all things he sees the working of that Word 
which is spirit, and the might of the mysteri- 
ous Word made Flesh. " O Lord God," cries 
Saint Augustine, "when shall I be wholly one 
with Thee ? " And if, in the despairing cry after 
the knowledge of the Life of God, the soul rises 
to some transient glimpse of the Divine Unity 
— the Beatific Vision — then, in bonds and 
chains before the judgment seat, such a one 
may yet stand free. Free, though perhaps but 
for an instant ; yet the memory of that instant 
is a glory, in the light of which all the bitterness 



THE WAY OF SOCRATES 151 

of life is overpast — a revelation, the living 
consciousness of which no human power can 
take away. 

By shame and death, Socrates triumphed 
over his accusers, making perfect in the tragedy 
of his fate the pure ideal of his life, " e resta la 
figura pill originate della storia dello spirito 
umano."(i-) The crime of his enemies became 
the sublime test and justification of that life 
apart with which they had reproached him : the 
life that he had been called to lead, even in their 
midst, by the secret promptings of the divine 
voice. His confident vindication of the free 
exercise of reason ; his heroic assertion of the 
right of the human soul to climb the heights 
and search the depths by which it is encom- 
passed, these are doctrines that have drawn 
new life from the virtue of his death. 

This appeal from the dictates of the prac- 
tical intelligence to the judgment of pure reason 
brings with it a necessaryandattendantpenalty, 
for it lies always under the shadow of political 
suspicion, which regards it as dangerous to the 

(I-) See Note A, p. 232. 



f 

152 OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

order of settled society. If those who take a ; 
way apart need no longer fear the cup of death, J 
they must at least be ready to accept the pain of 
isolation — more or less complete in accordance 
with the sense that their fellows have of their 
apartness, their independence, their renounce- 
ment of common ties. The pain of isolation — 
for isolation must in itself be painful to the soli- 
tary human heart — reveals to us, in compensa- 
tion, sources of secret strength. The soul is 
thus set free to listen to the voice of its desire, 
and to derive from the divine message that 
high courage and directness of thought, which, 
rooted in the profound conviction of personal 
duty, gives birth to an invincible constancy of 
spirit. 

This heroic mood is not to be born of tran- 
sient emotions. It is the outcome of that 
original and unflinching purpose which spurs 
the unwilling flesh to the conquest of the diffi- 
culties and fears that forbid admittance to the 
world of those gods " quibus imperium est ani- 
marum." How, in truth, should it be given to 
many freely to follow the highest way, and to 



THE VISION OF PERFECTION 153 

know that " whatsoever doth make manifest, 
is light " ? The imperfections attached to all 
earthlyaccomplishment weigh down our bravest 
effort. Yet, even so, even to those whose task 
in life is of the earth, earthy, and who are by 
duty pent within the crowded walls of great 
cities and prisoned by the violent wills of other 
men, some imperfect vision of things perfect 
may be won by constancy and faith in the beauty 
of things unseen. Such a vision has in its gift 
a magic charm, and confers a secret sense of 
abiding peace on the days of practical life. 

Thewaysof the unseen are manifold, having 
only this in common — they must be sought 
alone. The perfection of human love, the mys- 
tic excellence of sorrow, the fulness of know- 
ledge, yea, even the ecstasy that visits the soul 
at one with nature, in those moments when it 
rejoices merely in its hour of being — " I'humble 
petite chose frdmissante ou passe le grand cou- 
rant dternel"— joys such as these maybe known 
in the house, that is, the " place of peace," (i-) 

(!•) The words are from Ruskin's description of " Home," 
beginning, " This is the true nature of home . . . ," placed by me 

X 



154 OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE 

on the everlasting hills, in the quiet sheltering 
woods, in the meadows by the running rivers — 
wherever the spirit makes for itself some space 
of sacred solitude. 

Moreover, one may say that the life of medi- 
tation — although it is commonly regarded as 
estranged from the impulses and interests in 
which the practical intelligence finds satisfac- 
tion — is the life out of which the law goes forth, 
by which the life of action is ultimately gov- 
erned. All the great changes that have taken 
place in the lives of men, all the great changes 
that have affected the destinies of the race, have 
had their departure from the secret places of 
thought : " Geschrieben steht : Im Anfang war 
das Wort," and the life of the Word is the light 
of men. 

Watchman, what of the night? That is the 
question which, ultimately, the wanderers of the 
" wilderness " come to ask of him whose eyes 
are strained to pierce the darkness shrouding 
the unseen. And to our questioning, he 

over the door of the house at Pyrford Rough when I built it, and 
retained by Lady Dilke when she altered the front. — Editor. 



THE SECRET OF LIFE AND DEATH 155 

will make answer, speaking of those things 
which in the tumult of the world — full of the 
exclusive claims of life — would otherwise be 
forgotten. Whether he looks out over the 
kingdoms of the earth, or seeks the way by 
prayer and praise, by love and sorrow, or by 
labour and by learning, he will tell us of things 
more precious than life itself, he will bid us 
remember that for great souls the true reasons 
for living are often identical with the true 
reasons for dying, and that the way of per- 
fection, if it does not lead us to the desert, 
points inevitably to the path whereby we may 
" flee fro the prease." 



OF LOVE AND SORROW 



c 



J 



IN PRAISE OF LOVE AND 
SORROW 

*' O sovereign power of love ! O grief ! O balm ! " 

In the land of Provence an old legend is told 
concerning two maidens who desired to hear 
their fortunes from the lips of an ancient witch. 
These two maidens were, it is said, sisters, — 
daughters of a man of wealth and power ; one 
was dark, the other fair, and both were beau- 
tiful. With great gifts in their hands, they set 
forth on their errand, and, having found her 
whom they sought, they laid their offerings at 
her feet and entreated her to fulfil their desire. 
She, however, was in an evil mood, and casting 
their gifts from her as if of no account, she rose 
from the place where she sat in the sun among 
the lavender bushes on the hillside, and turned 

159 



i6o OF LOVE AND SORROW 

about as though she would have gone from 
them without speech. 

Then the dark maid, that was the elder of 
the two, caught her by the sleeve and besought 
her with tears that she should give answer to 
her prayer. In the end she prevailed, and the 
witch, taking her hand in hers, looked upon it 
for a space and spoke, but her voice was slow 
and her words bitter. " I see," she said, "no 
good, but evil only concerning thee. Dark 
shall be thy days, and scant thy portion. A 
beggar shalt thou stand without the gates of 
thy father's house, and the bones of those that 
are born of thy body shall be cast out over 
desolate places." 

At these words, the heart of the maid was 
troubled, but in a little while she bethought 
herself, and again made her appeal, saying, 
" One thing more I will ask of thee, O most 
wise one ! Tell me this thing only ! Shall he 
whom I shall love, love me ? " And when the 
witch answered and said, " Yea, even so, he 
shall love thee," the girl took heart and rejoiced, 
for she thought, "If he whom I shall love. 



THE BLISS OF LOVING i6i 

love me, then shall no man call my days 
unblessed." 

Now, on this, the fair maid, that was the 
younger of the two, drew near in her turn, and 
to all her questions she received the like bitter 
answers. Moreover, at the last, when she 
repeated her sister's words, asking, " Will he 
whom I shall love, love me ? " the witch replied, 
"Nay, no man shall love thee," and, as she 
said this, she laughed and said, " Have you 
naught else, O foolish one, that you may desire 
of me ? " And the girl took thought but for an 
instant, and cried, " Mother, what more should 
I desire of thee, or what more should I ask of 
life, if to love be given unto me ? " 

The true significance of this legend was 
clearly indicated by M. Frangois Coppee, when 
he embodied it in his poem " I'Horoscope," 
but most of those who read it in his version 
seem to have missed his point. Some of his 
critics went absolutely astray. The phrases 
exchanged between the elder sister and the 
witch were received for simple sense, but the 
words of the younger — who learned that whilst 



1 62 OF LOVE AND SORROW 

loving she might never know the joy of being 
loved — were condemned as unintelligible. The 
woman who could possibly imagine that the 
highest bliss might be found in love without 
return was pronounced an unnatural and ridi- 
culous creation, bred of indulgence in false and 
morbid sentiment. 

Yet this sentiment which was condemned 
as absurd, as false to nature and to truth, is no 
other than that which has nourished in all 
time the noblest forms of human love and 
devotion. It is the sentiment which inspired 
with sublime passion the well-known words of 
Saint Teresa : "Thou drawest me, my God. 
. . . Thy death agony draws me ; Thy love 
draws me, so that, should there be no Heaven, 
I would love Thee. Were there no Hell, I 
would fear Thee no less. Give me naught in 
return for this my love to Thee ; for were I 
not to hope that I long for, then should I love 
Thee even as I do now." 

Not until the passion of self-abandonment 
has touched the point at which the words, 
" Though He slay me yet will I trust in Him," 



THE CALL TO THE HIGHER LIFE 163 

are the simple and natural expression of pride 
and joy, is that height of exaltation reached 
the attainment of which includes the highest 
possibilities of love and sorrow. For " love's 
limits are ample and great, and a spacious walk 
it hath, but with thorns not lightly to be passed 
over." 

The call to love, rightly understood, is, in 
truth, a call to self-renunciation, as indeed is 
every call to lead the higher life. The soul to 
whom such a call comes is directly confronted 
with the necessities of sacrifice, for devotion to 
another in its highest form leads to the way of 
the Cross. Only through much suffering may 
the Saint attain the fulfilment of the promise 
of the spiritual life and see Him face to face, 
yet in her triumph she cries, " Give me naught 
in return for this my love to Thee!" In 
a like spirit, the girl of the Provencal legend 
says, " What more shall I ask of life, if to love 
be given unto me ? " The possible unworthi- 
ness of the object of devotion such as this, 
casts no blemish on its beauty, and the lesson 
of its faithfulness shows as a human shadow 



1 64 OF LOVE AND SORROW 

of the divine mystery of the sacrifice, having 
power to blot out evil in others by the virtue 
of its own selfless passion. For in human 
love we daily see that the first thing sought 
must be the full bestowal of that confidence on 
the part of the one loved that cannot be shown 
except as in the mirror of itself: so the soul 
desiring this priceless gift of another must 
itself be free from every personal impulse 
which may check or hinder the purity of 
another's truth. The answer to the call to love 
must be, '' Here I am, O Lord, do with me as 
Thou wilt." 

To attain such extremity of passion, the one 
thing needful— whether we seek the love of God 
or man — is unfaltering courage, that quality 
which alone places great things within our 
reach. Something of this splendid and tem- 
pered strength shows itself in the fine Pagan 
stoicism of the greater figures of the eighteenth 
century. The calm with which many of these 
men, having a clear-eyed vision of their life's 
tragedy, met calamity and death self-controlled 
and set above the momentary horror by a 



THE LITERATURE OF SENTIMENT 165 

steadfast resoluteness of purpose, was often 
little less than heroic. Under the tyranny of 
the Napoleonic Empire the human spirit 
developed a significant weakness of moral fibre. 
No more typical example can be named than 
Chateaubriand. His magnificent attitude fails 
to mask the tawdry poverty of his self-pity, or 
the weakness of a nature unable to trust in its 
own power without claiming the incessant, re- 
assuring suffrages of others. 

The same feeble temper shows itself in the 
later verse of Madame Desbordes-Valmore — a 
less notorious but a delicate and a sincere soul. 
Her cry is always, " Moi, je suis tombde ! " or, 
" Mon cceur est plein de larmes ! " Tears are 
the incessant refrain of her verse, and in her 
letters she insists solely on the deep sources 
of sorrow lying within us, which leave us no 
choice but to fall on our knees in acquiescence. 
This solemn note of grief is not only called out 
by grave events of death and sorrow : it per- 
vades the whole view of life — " j'aurais adore 
I'dtude," she writes, " des pontes et de la 
podsie ; il a fallu me contenter d'y r^ver, comme 



i66 OF LOVE AND SORROW 

a tous les biens de ce monde ; " and she 
turns for comfort to the Imitation — " ce livre 
d'dternel amour qu'il faut toujours porter sur 
son coeur." 

The voice of the Imitation has indeed an 
alluring charm for the souls that shrink from 
strife. Its constant cry of" Come. Come and 
talk of thyself with God ! " has the all-potent 
attraction of the confessional. The disciple 
sees before him, in compensation for any loss 
of earthly pleasures, infinite possibilities of 
present satisfaction in the perpetual contem- 
plation of himself illumined by the vision of 
eternal bliss. Well may he cry with Saint 
Augustine, " Quod magni sunt fructus con- 
fessionis." For, as the voice repeats, " This 
is the highest wisdom, through contempt of 
the world to reach towards the Kingdom of 
Heaven ! " 

The perfection of this precept is, however, 
flawed by those calculations of gain and loss 
which, as was seen by Saint Teresa, needs 
must vitiate the integrity of the spiritual life. 
In later days, from a different intellectual 



SELFLESS PASSION 167 

standpoint, Auguste Comte saw just as clearly 
the strength to be won through the rejection 
of all selfish inducements to follow the way, 
and deliberately stripped it bare from every 
hope. The feeble soul that may be lured to 
love and service by the promise of reward is, 
indeed, unworthy to be enrolled in the regiment 
of Heaven. We needs must follow with assent 
the w^ords in which the Saint disclaims with 
poignant ardour all thought of personal ad- 
vantage, the desire of Heaven and the fear of 
Hell being alike blotted out in the burning 
radiance of devotion : " Thou drawest me, my 
God. . . . Thy death agony draws me ; Thy 
love draws me, so that, should there be no 
Heaven, I would love Thee. Were there no 
Hell, I would fear Thee." 

To reach this majestic height of selfless 
passion, the soul must first have descended 
into Hell — must have known the infinite 
depths of sorrow. Without such experience, 
how should a man wholly give himself up to 
the service of others, how should the Saint 
fully love Christ and suffer this agony with 



i68 OF LOVE AND SORROW 

Him? The office in which the hours of 
Gethsemane are commemorated by the Church 
is, indeed, a mere formal ceremony to the 
worshipper who is without the knowledge of 
spiritual love — that love of which human love 
may be the teacher only if it has taken the 
lover to stand at the foot of the Cross. There, 
and there alone, when his conception of the 
Divine passion has been vivified by his own 
anguish, a man may find the sublime strength 
that will enable him to take up his ordained 
burden — not in fear and trembling as some- 
thing too heavy to be borne, but with triumph- 
ant joy — the joy of the lover whose soul burns 
upward to his point of bliss. What more, 
indeed, should he ask of life, if to love be 
given unto him ? 

To such a spirit as this there may haply 
come the revelation that a great sorrow — like 
any other great possession — is a great trust. 
The very magnitude of a great calamity or 
grief confers in itself the privilege of exception, 
and, in the measure in which it brings " de- 
tachment," it brings that true mastery of self 



COMPLETING POWER OF SORROW 169 

without which — no matter how much else we 
may attain — our lives must be incomplete. 
With some such catastrophe, involving the 
apparent ruin of his life, and bringing with it 
his betrayal by those in whom he trusted, 
Jacques Rutebeuf seems to have been face to 
face when he wrote — 

" Que sont mi ami devenu 
Que j'avoie si pr^s tenu 

Et tant ame ? 
Je cuit li vens les a ost^ ; 

L'amor est morte. 
Ce sont ami que venz emporte 
Et 11 ventoit devant ma porte." 

This, however, is not the language of him 
who has won freedom in the loss of things 
earthly, and to whom — though the favourable 
answer sought with prayer and bitter tears has 
been denied — the gates of Heaven itself have 
been unlocked. It is the complaint of one who 
dreads the unkindness of the blast and the 
sharp sting of trust and love betrayed. 

The high courage which can embrace the 
Cross without fear, the courage which rises 
victorious over death and shame, is known onlv 



I70 OF LOVE AND SORROW 

to the soul whose source of strength is within 
itself. In the experience of the supreme moment 
when the great agony and the great joy become 
one, the moment which combines the perfect- 
ing of self-realization and self-renunciation, we 
have the full significance of the old Provencal 
legend revealed. After its own fashion, it 
teaches the lesson which the philosopher and 
the mystic unweariedly repeat. It says that 
there are those who are privileged to drink of 
that fount and spring of life and healing which 
no worldly accident can trouble, and whose 
patient eyes are visited by the unfading glories 
known to those only who have found the House 
of Peace through the way of the spiritual life. 



OF PRAYER AND PRAISE 



i 



OF PRAYER AND PRAISE (') 



O, Gioia, O ineffabile allegrezza ! 
O, vita intera d'amor e di pace ! (2.) 

When a man leaveth his closet after prayer, 
his soul should be at peace with God and in 
charity with men. This is a simple statement 
of the prize to be won by the faithful exercise 
of prayer, — the spiritual manifestation of de- 
sire ; but the superstitions which obscure the 
true conception of its efficacy have drawn 
nourishment from every chance coincidence, 
so that the beautiful and sacred change of 

(I.) Lady Dilke first showed me this chapter at Pyrford on the 
first Sunday after we arrived there last autumn, exactly a week 
before she died. It had, she said, passages which, though clear 
to her, would be obscure to others, but, " now, I shall have time, 
as I am to rest, and to go more slowly with the other books." 
This one was always intended to appear only after her death, or 
in the retirement of her old age. — Editor. 
(2.) See Note B, p. 232. 

173 



174 OF PRAYER AND PRAISE 

spirit that is within its gift has been travestied 
into a mere ignoble process of exchange and 
barter: ''Qu'un matelot ait fait sa pri^re de- 
vant la figure de Sainte-Barbe, il n'a plus de 
dangers a craindre. II y a meme des Saints 
qu'on invoque pour obtenir des richesses ; tel 
est Saint-Erasme ; " and Brantdme's trooper, 
cheating at the dice, invokes God Himself to 
cover his hazard, with " Pais quatorze, Dieu ! 
ou tu perds une ame chrdtienne ! " 

Examples of the efficacy of prayer for 
others, if not so blasphemous, are more gro- 
tesque. Once, we are told, there was a Pope, 
who, when he had come to his last days, asked 
his chaplain, a proper and devout man, by what 
means he would succour him in his agony. 
The chaplain replied, "In every possible way." 
" Then," said the Pope, " I ask of thee no other 
help than that, when thou shalt see me in the 
passage of death, thou shalt say for me Our 
Lords prayer three times over." This the 
chaplain promised to do in all diligence and 
devotion. As it had been required of him so 
he did. The Pope died, and, after his death, 



HOW TO PRAY 175 

showed himself to the chaplain in glory, thank- 
ing him and saying that he had been freed from 
the body without suffering. " For," said he, 
" at the first Pater, Jesus Christ — showing His 
Bloody Sweat to the Father — drove away all 
pain ; after the second, He atoned for my sins 
by the bitterness of His Passion — and they flew 
away like a cloud ; after the third. He opened 
Heaven to me by His charity and led me to 
eternal bliss." 

It is true that the story of the Pope's three 
Paternosters dates back from the early days 
of the sixteenth century, when it was told for 
the encouragement of "une femme seculi^re," 
in the sure belief that even the vicarious re- 
petition of this prayer would act as a charm. 
Threefold repetition, she is told, would deliver 
us from our enemies, procure the pardon of 
our sins, and open to us the gates of heaven ! 
But, without slipping to the level of the trooper 
or the Pope, the devout may still come very far 
short of the efficient practice of prayer directed 
to the attainment of its proper ends. 

And, firstly, prayer, like praise, is a weapon 



176 OF PRAYER AND PRAISE 

in the soul's armoury that must be kept bright 
by constant exercise ; not reserved for special 
occasions. Signal and disastrous failure in 
this world has always been held to justify 
retirement from it. When men will have no 
more of our service, the hour has come to 
transfer it with prayers and fasting to the 
House of God. Yet here, as in other direc- 
tions, the laws of the life spiritual are at one 
with the wisdom of this world ; none can deny 
the power of prayer to create an atmosphere, 
and the power of an atmosphere to foster the 
conditions that may bring fulfilment of the 
desires expressed in prayer. Its use, therefore, 
in the secular life — insomuch as, if honestly 
practised, it may largely modify our relations 
to those about us — is even more important 
than in the religious life, in which we are 
fenced about and guarded from the immediate 
influence of others. 

Nevertheless, the misconception of the 
proper use of prayer and of the benefits it 
confers is such, that by far the larger number 
of those who pray are satisfied to formulate a 



THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PRAYER 177 

demand for some gift or grace, which they 
expect to receive promptly and in the sense in 
which they have demanded it. Some may 
get as far as " Da mihi hoc semper desiderare 
et velle quod tibi magis acceptum est et carius 
placet " ; but even this has only the accent of 
gentle acquiescence without any of the superb 
courage of the divine prayer upon the Mount. 
Instances there are, not a few, which show 
us daily how immense is the lapse from the true 
spiritual conception of the office of prayer — 
whether employed in the service of others or on 
our own behalf— the moment we materialize 
it. To materialize the objects of prayer does in 
fact destroy its highest significance and force. 
These are to be sought in the ennobling and 
purifying of our views and desires, whether 
for others or ourselves. The habit of fixing 
the mind on given objects clears our vision, 
and the desire of the hour is seen in its deep 
relation to the past and coming years. And 
even so, the effort to desire good for others, 
even for those at whose hands we may have 
suffered wrong, may possibly bring us to a 

2 A 



178 OF PRAYER AND PRAISE 

kinder view of their character and acts. These, 
if they cannot be harmonized with the standard 
of our own life, we may at least regard with 
some measure of charity. 

It is, perhaps, easier to feel as one ought 
about the bitterest enemy than to live perfectly 
with a friend. Great wrongs are rare, and have 
generally some exciting elements which call 
forth in the injured a greater magnanimity, but 
to obtain such virtue, its source and spring must 
have been strengthened by previous habit. The 
resource of prayer must be sought not only in 
great emergencies, for the character of our de- 
cisions in emergencies will be determined by 
the habit of right-willing built up out of the 
trivial opportunities of life. Then the critical 
decision of an occasion that appeals to the 
imagination and the emotions is taken as it 
were involuntarily— free from the petty ob- 
stacles potent enough to hinder unselfish 
resolve in the ordinary day. 

This, too, is one of the chief uses of prayer, 
that it should give direction to the courses of 
our being. The vision cleared by daily effort 



THE OPEN VISION 179 

to behold those things that have place in our 
immediate purpose will soon command a com- 
plete view of the object of life, and the attempt 
made to draw our thoughts about one special 
point of desire will be illuminating as to the 
quality and nature of our desires generally. 
For persistence in this office should not lead us 
into cowardly subjection to the difficulties and 
crises of our days, but should arouse rather the 
spirit of conquest and the power of praise — 
training us to a high courage. To such a spirit, 
calamity, grief, and defeat even of high and 
cherished hopes will come not as afflictions to 
be suffered, but as opportunities for proof of 
strength. 

The note of praise once reached, its office is, 
even humanly speaking, no less serviceable. It 
is the attitude of mind that gives courage for 
the attack of things difficult. The healthy soul 
cannot accept the view, taken by many of the 
devout, that our mortal state is so sunk and 
wretched that, should we look closely into it, 
we must remain for ever inconsolable. By no 
man have such as these been reproached more 



i8o OF PRAYER AND PRAISE 

than by Dante, who had had himself much 
cause for sadness. To the sorrowful he assigns 
the shades of the fourth circle of hell, and out 
of their darkness they cry unto him — 

" Tristi fummo 
Nel aer dolce che dal sol s'allegra, 
Portando dentro accidioso fummo ; 
Or ci attristiam nella belletta negra." (i-) 

The very spring and source of noble living 
is surely to be found in the pure joy of life. 
The instinctive pleasures of movement which 
make glad the heart of the child, and conduct 
the flight and poise of the bird on the wing 
through the sky or the green labyrinth of the 
woods ; that simple sense of physical delight 
which comes to us in a thousand ways at all 
times and places; the ecstasy which the rain 
and the wind bring to the body that may battle 
against them ; the mysterious consciousness of 
union with life universal which may visit any 
one of us : — the gifts of life that stir the pulses 
to praise are not to be numbered. Yet the un- 
gracious spirit has been known to declare that 

(I.) See Note C, p. 232, 



THE JOY OF LIFE i8i 

nature offers nothing better to mortal men than 
the sense of relief from pain — 

" O natura cortese, 
Son questi i doni tuoi, 
Questi i diletti sono^ 
Che tu porgi ai mortali. Uscir di pena 
E diletto fra noi."(i-) 

The description of calm after storm which 
Leopardi closed with these words actually con- 
tains a thousand suggestions of pleasure — the 
glorious sweep of the clouds clearing from the 
mountains; the rejoicing voices of the birds ; 
the river shiningcrystal clearin the valleyas the 
light breaks on it from the west; thesungilding 
anewthe little hamlets nestling in the hills ; the 
song of the workman taking up his interrupted 
toil ; the laughter of the women going forth to 
seek water at springs fed by the freshly fallen 
rain ;— all these things are there, but the glad- 
ness of every heart has failed to bring to the 
poet any vision of the spirit of delight ; to him 
these lovely sights and sounds are but " Gioia 
vana, ch'^ frutto del passato timore."(2.) 

{!•) See Note D, p. 232. 
(2.) See Note E, p. 232. 



1 82 OF PRAYER AND PRAISE 

The supreme expression of this temper of 
mind is to be found in the opening lines of the 
" Chorus of the Dead," the sombre beauty of 
which must appeal even to unwilling ears — 

" Sola nel mondo eterno, a cui si volve 
Ogni creata cosa, 
In te morte si posa 
Nostra ignuda natura 
Lieta no, ma sicura 
Dell' antico dolor . . . "(i) 

A majestic chaunt, but one which unnerves the 
spirit with the ghostly oppression of a fatal 
doom. The energy which should carry us on 
to the conquest of things visible and invisible 
is sapped by the persistent will to dwell only on 
the tragic and terrible aspects of nature. The 
accents of praise are silenced. In contrast with 
this deathly quiet as of the tomb, the cry of 
Maecenas, " vita dum superest bene est," has 
a reassuring echo of the divine harmony of 
praise. 

O golden sands of life that slip noiselessly 
through our reluctant fingers, are there any 
words whereby your gift may not be praised ? 

(I.) See Note F, p. 232. 



BENEDICITE i8 







In our joy of the storm, of the wind and rain, 
in our worship of the blessed sun, in our awe 
of the wrath and splendour of the sea, in our 
acknowledgment of all the fruitful glories of the 
earth, do we not praise ? And may we not, by 
the true and faithful use of praise and prayer, 
bring to the service of our souls such balance 
of wisdom and charity that our spiritual life, 
harboured in love and peace, shall inspire us 
with joy ineffable ? 



OF LABOUR AND OF LEARNING 



OF LABOUR AND OF LEARNING 



" Let any one of you having a loaf of bread, sell half and buy 
with it the flowers of the narcissus ; for as bread nourisheth the 
body, so do the flowers of the narcissus nourish the soul." 

" Learning and Labour," said Folly, " have 
slipped into the world like the other plagues 
of human life. No one knew anything about 
them in the Golden Age: men then — without 
method, without rules, without instruction — 
lived happy under the guidance of nature." 

The Golden Age has vanished, but to know 
nothing either about labour or learning is still 
the healthy ambition of the majority of man- 
kind. Folly, when she denounces Learning for 
as great a plague as Labour, comes far nearer 
the true opinion of men than Dante, who opens 
his " Convivio " with the audacious assertion 
that " all men naturally desire Learning : " 

187 2 B 2 



1 88 OF LABOUR AND OF LEARNING 

*'Tutti gli huomini naturalmente desideranno 
di sapere " — a statement to which any school- 
master can give the lie. 

The sentiments which are placed by Eras- 
mus in the mouth of Folly may often be heard 
on the lips of many who cannot express them 
so well. All that is to be said on her side has 
been said in the " Moriae Encomium " not only 
with convincing wit, but with inimitable grace 
and delicacy. Even the necessary effort by 
means of which the real wants of life are, in 
general, easily supplied, is to most of us 
distasteful. Those very activities, the in- 
stinctive exercise of which is in itself a 
joy, become irksome when imposed as the 
necessary means to an end, however de- 
sirable. 

Yet the eyes of the wise have seen no evil 
in labour. They have, it is true, regretted, 
with John Woolman, the irregular distribution 
of its profitable exercise and the sufferings of 
all those oppressed by too great a strain upon 
their strength. The difficulty which distressed 
the simple Quaker — whose writings Charles 



THE USE OF KNOWLEDGE 189 

Lamb advises us " to get by heart " — has 
troubled many who are not so sure as he that 
" if more men were usefully employed, and 
fewer ate bread as a reward for doing that which 
is not useful, food and raiment would, on a 
reasonable estimate, be more in proportion to 
labour than they are at present." 

Hateful, though, as may be the enforced 
effort by which the needs of the body and its 
pleasures also are supplied, it is not so repug- 
nant to human weakness as that which must be 
made before we come within sight of the pro- 
vision needed for the nourishment of the soul. 

The desire of learning and of learning for its 
own sake is, in truth, a very rare desire — " Non 
se de' chiamar letterato chi acquista lettere 
per fare denari."(iO By learning we mean 
that labour by which we acquire the strength 
to conquer those mental positions from which 
we may embrace wider and yet wider possi- 
bilities of sight. For true learning aims not so 
much at the furnishing of the mind with varied 
knowledge, as at producing the conditions 

(I-) See Note G, p. 232. 



I90 OF LABOUR AND OF LEARNING 

under which things may be known in their 
fullest significance. Knowledge of facts has, 
in itself, little value, — it makes no differ- 
ence whether a thousand or a hundred facts 
are in our possession, unless we have learnt to 
see for ourselves the relation in which they 
stand to each other. Without this habit and 
this power of thought the facts of which a man 
may have knowledge are no more to him than 
the signs of a language the meaning of which 
is hidden. 

With those who are the slaves, more or less 
unwilling, to such service of the body or the 
mind, we have naught to do ; our business is 
rather with those who love both labour and 
learning; and seek not only bread, but also 
the flowers of the narcissus. Of such as belong 
to this choice company who desire w^ith a 
single heart the riches of the full assurance of 
understanding, those there are, not the least 
worthy, who have left no shining record of 
their living. Some are content to fix their 
ambition on the perfect achievement of a single 
end, and these invariably make a braver show 



THE JUDGMENT OF THE CROWD 191 

in the eye of the world than those whose 
energies are spent in divers not obviously 
consenting ways. 

Thus it comes to pass, that when the pub- 
lic appoints a day of judgment for the writer 
with his books, or for the painter with his 
posthumous exhibition, he who produces the 
greatest impression on the crowd, he who seems 
to be represented by the most complete and 
corporate whole, is not always he who has lived 
out his life and fulfilled his powders the most 
completely. 

Take, for example, one who held a most 
distinguished place amongst those painters 
who were drawn by the first movement of 
Western curiosity towards the East. Eugene 
Fromentin was a painter by temperament, yet 
he had hesitated for years before making choice 
of his profession. No doubt he felt, instinc- 
tively, that he needed other means to obtain 
for himself complete expression. It was, in 
fact, impossible to see in the group of paintings 
brought together at the Ecole des Beaux Arts 
after his death anything like a coherent body 



192 OF LABOUR AND OF LEARNING 

of work. In order to appreciate and estimate 
the genius of the man — whose personality had 
so great a charm for his contemporaries — one 
had to keep in mind, as one stood before the 
varied crowd of sketches and paintings hang- 
ing on the walls, that other work, the brilliance 
of which showed that its author received im- 
pressions which he knew it was impossible to 
render except by his pen. 

The exquisite pages of '' Un 6t6 dans le 
Sahara " and " Une annde dans le Sahel " 
were needed to complete Fromentin's message 
to us concerning the East, to which he gave his 
whole-souled devotion. In the notes of the 
Journal written on the Nile, when he went 
in the train of the Empress to the opening of 
the Suez Canal, we have an even more vivid 
reflection of things seen. There are brief 
passages which recall, as no sketch can do, 
the vast solitude, the immense monotony of 
the waste of waters enamelled with fleeting 
hues of mysterious colour, trembling and 
changing in the fierce play of blinding midday 
light, or tempered and transfused by the magic 



THE WRITER AND THE PAINTER 193 

haze of sunset. The pages of the Journal are 
an epitome of impressions which could not be 
transferred to canvas, yet no less vividly felt 
than those which would have lent themselves 
to shapes of colour and light. 

And again, before we can see Fromen- 
tin clearly we must recognize that wealth of 
sympathetic appreciation which enabled him 
to view with delight the beauty of work utterly 
unlike his own, whether in style or object. 
This charms us by its genial inspiration in his 
*' Maitres d autrefois," whilst in " Dominique " 
— that early novel which won the eulogy of 
George Sand, and which was in some respects 
connected with the actual experiences of his 
youth — we are allowed to touch the most secret 
chords of his being, and to know, in a parable, 
something of those things the reality of which 
a man hides from his nearest friends. 

Puzzled by the twin manifestations of an 
activity, neither of which was in itself complete, 
though both possessed original value, one seeks 
for some dominant note which may give unity 
to the appearance of scattered effort. One finds 

2 c 



194 OF LABOUR AND OF LEARNING 

it, I think, in Fromentin's distinguished sense 
of style. The rare sense of style which pervades 
all his work, and which brought to him instant 
recognition from those who were themselves 
masters of style, is the clue to the secret ambi- 
tion which dignified Fromentin's life and work. 
He defines it when he closes his sketch of 
various experiences with the words — 

" Mais depuis, j'ai compris qu'entre ce monde et I'autre 
L'Art humain doit servir d'interprbte et d'apotre." 

Lines such as these were evidently written, 
not by one of the robust sort who fight their 
way to the heart's desire through blood and 
tears, but by one of those who are attuned to 
the vibration of the most delicate harmonies. 
Of such are those who belong to that band by 
whom the doing of what the world calls a great 
work is voluntarily foregone in order that they 
may accomplish the full expression of an ideal. 
On this wise, the obvious outcome of a man's 
life may appear but a poor achievement, whilst 
his life itself may gain in beauty and complete- 
ness, since it has been consistent even in its 



SELF-RENUNCIATION IN WORK 195 

inconsistencies. For to the perfect accom- 
plishment of a great work that the world can 
recognize to be such, a man the more often must 
sacrifice some of the fulness of his secret life : 
" Quand on veut faire surgir une idee les 
moyens s'imposent." 

This is true, not only of the necessities of a 
great labour, but of the necessities of a great 
experience. It is not the monk alone who must 
forego even the innocent joys of life in order 
that his whole strength may be directed into the 
one channel ; and the injunction, " he that 
loveth father or mother more than Me is not 
worthy of Me," which fixes the cardinal point of 
Christian living, denotes equally the cardinal 
point of all life uncompromisingly devoted to 
the fulfilment of a single purpose. 

Life in its highest sense — the life which is 
based on labour and on learning, and seeks 
not bread alone but also the flowers of the nar- 
cissus — is of robust growth, and pays no heed 
to let or hindrance in the pursuit of its end. 
He who has his nation to honour or defend, 
his service to pay to science or his name to 



196 OF LABOUR AND OF LEARNING 

illustrate, must keep his aim ever before him. 
All other interests and ties must be held in sub- 
jection to his purpose— choice for him there is 
little or none. Neither can he who seeks to 
know the fulness of life decide through what 
vicissitudes of experience he will be made 
free. 

Those ignorant ones are but the approved 
of folly who would prevent knowledge by the 
fear of sin. They discern but dimly the nature 
of the tests that may have to be encountered by 
him who seeks the way of his own perfection. 
Sin, however grievous it may appear in itself, is 
no final bar to growth in life : the one hopeless 
state is death, for deadness is incapacity to feel. 
Slips by the way cannot count against the pro- 
gress made towards the high and ultimate goal. 
A great captain profits, we are told, by the mis- 
takes of his enemy ; he is yet greater who can 
profit fearlessly by his own. 

The magnificent robustness of conscience 
necessary to this end is a feature which distin- 
guishes all great pictures of life, nor is it in any 
more marked than in the mystical romance of 



THE HOLY GRAIL 197 

" La Mort d'Arthure." Scenes of high cere- 
monial, of royal pomp, of statecraft, of battle, 
murder, rapine, deadly wrong, and sins un- 
nameable, are woven into the vast web of the 
story. Now and again are heard the chaunt of 
nuns and the voice of priests, or a horn an- 
nounces the coming of the queen, accompanied 
by her knights and ladies. But, on a sudden, 
whilst men dream their dreams of earthly joy 
and earthly love, a sound is heard as of wings, 
every voice is hushed, and the white dove ap- 
pears that heralds the mysterious vision of the 
Sancgreall ; in her bill there seems a little 
censer of gold, and therewithal is such a savour 
as though all the spicery of the Avorld had been 
there, and each man in that mystic presence 
eats and drinks the thing that he loves best. 

Distinct from all the company of kings and 
nobles swayed by the conflict of human passions 
with knightly ideals, stand out the heroic figure 
of that " noble clerke and holy man," the Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury, and those of the great 
queen and great knight — who was " come out 
of the eighth degree from our Lord Jesus 



198 OF LABOUR AND OF LEARNING 

Christ " — sinning out their sin, advancing step 
by step, fatally drawn onward to thefinal tragedy. 
Then, when brought to bay with consequences 
— erect, unshaken in the ruin and disaster of the 
state, they two reckon these things over as one 
might the pawns lost or won at the game of 
chess. Even in her penitence, the queen stands 
out as ruler and abbess of the religious house 
in which she has taken refuge, assuming privi- 
lege not so much as proper to her rank as of the 
right belonging to her heroic mould. Calling 
ladies and gentlewomen about her, " as sinfull 
creatures as ever was I," says she, " are Saints 
in Heaven." And on the same high level 
Lancelotbears his witness, and, standing before 
her, declares, " Sithence, yee have taken you 
unto perfection, I must needes take me unto 
perfection of right. For I take record of God 
in you have I had mine earthly joy. And if I 
had found you so disposed now, I had cast mee 
for to have had you into mine owne realme and 
countrey." But Guenever, the queen, dominant 
and strong as when she brought him to for- 
swear himself after his solemn oath taken before 



LANCELOT AND GUENEVER 199 

the Sancgreall, denies him even a parting kiss. 
" I pray you kiss me once," says Lancelot, " and 
never more." " ' Nay,' said the queene, ' that 
shall I never doe, but abstaine you from such 
things,' and soe they departed." 

There is no question in these closing scenes 
of a passion that has exhausted its strength. 
We are told of the parting between the queen 
and her lover that there was " never so hard a 
hearted man but hee would have wept to see the 
sorrow that they made ; for there was a lamen- 
tation as though they had beene stungen with 
speares, and many times they sowned," but 
there is no hint of flinching, no hesitation as to 
the instant acceptance of the due penalty. They 
part, they suffer, they die in bitterest anguish, 
with the same superb and royal resolution that 
they had brought to the encounter of all the 
vicissitudes of their ill-fated love. 

The forceful determination with which, not 
Lancelot and Guenever alone, but every one 
who comes upon the scene, follows his or her 
appointed adventure, the calm with which the 
most tragic fates are faced, speaks to us at least 



200 OF LABOUR AND OF LEARNING 

of the high-souled temper in which alone great 
things can be accomplished. This is, indeed, 
the temper which must above all things be his 
who — in singleness of heart — seeks by labour 
and by learning to know the fulness of life. 

In the highest development of this ideal, 
learning itself becomes not an object but an 
experience ; it becomes, as does labour, a means 
to an end, that end being the perfection of body 
and soul. The discipline involved in training 
the body to physical excellence ; the lessoning 
of the heart in the single affections that may 
carry us onward to the conception of a god-like 
charity ; the schooling of the mind until per- 
sistence in the effort of apprehension brings the 
universe itself within its view; — all thesethings 
are within the compass of the labour and the 
learning of man. Furthermore, the daily exer- 
cise, by which all the forces of our being are 
brought to bear not only on the varied wisdom 
of the ages, but on the great spaces of human 
thought, will bring to us finally the balance 
and serenity of poise which place the soul's 
content beyond the clamour of the idle or the 



BREAD THAT PERISHETH 201 

foolish tongues of men. Even bread, that is 
the staff of life, is a thing of no account in the 
eyes of him who desires, with a whole heart, 
the possession of the flowers of the nar- 
cissus. 



2 D 



OF THE HILLS AND PLAINS 



^ 



IN PRAISE OF THE HILLS AND 
PLAINS 



" Che fa I'aria infinita, e quel profondo 
Infinite seren ? Che vuol dir questa 
Solitudine immensa ? Ed io che sono ? " (i-) 

In the opening chapter of the fifth volume (2.) 
of " Modern Painters," there is a lovely passage 
in which Mr. Ruskin tells us that he has often 
felt as if nature must have sorrowed in the days 
when men knew no delight in her beauties. He 
draws a picture of the trees putting forth their 
tender buds, and grieving all the while because 
the country was disturbed by armed men, and 
because, instead of being free to spread them- 
selves over the fields and rejoice with all things 
in the joy of spring, those who should have 

(I.) See Note H, p. 232. 

(2.) Given her by her father, in i860, as had been another volume, 
by Ruskin himself, in 1859. — Editor. 

205 



2o6 OF THE HILLS AND PLAINS 

been trooping out to admire God's handiwork 
in the blossoming and renewing of the earth 
were shut within the towns for safety. Think- 
ing over his eloquent words, I began to wonder 
whether there ever was a time when men did 
not love nature. When I called to mind certain 
very old words, — certain bits of landscape that 
the Romans had painted and the fair meadows 
in which early Italian painters had often placed 
the Madonna and her Holy Child, I asked 
myself whether it was not possible that — even 
when they said the least about it — they wor- 
shipped her truly in their hearts ! Perhaps the 
great difference between their time and oursiVes 
in this, that we have now learnt to express our- 
selves very readily and unrestrainedly about 
everything ; we have learnt to talk about art 
and about nature ; about our own experiences 
and about those of others ; about things high 
and holy, and about things low and foul, with 
equal unreserve and fluency and irreverence. 
This freedom of expression ; this want of reti- 
cence which is in some ways one of the worst 
features of our day, at least gives us the chance 



THE LOVE OF NATURE 207 

of knowing a great deal about our own ways 
and interests ; and thus we have outspoken 
evidence of that indwelling passion for nature 
of which so little was heard when men talked 
of their sensations and impressions less freely. 

One thing, however, may be noticed in 
which we can certainly be shown to love nature, 
if not more, at least very differently from the 
way in which our forefathers loved her. We 
are much bolder in our loves than they were. 
The painters of four hundred years ago painted 
most carefully the little flowers of the fore- 
ground, the blessed daisy shining in the grass, 
the white rose in its silver pallor, or the scarlet 
blossom in the flush of its glory. They never 
seemed to care much about the far-off mountains 
and their ice and snow. 

Now, I confess that I share this spirit, and 
that I am oppressed by the great mountains, 
but I also acknowledge that this is not the 
modern spirit, and that, just as the present cen- 
tury has resolved to leave nothing unsaid, even 
so it has resolved to leave nothing unclimbed. 
Yet on the other hand, I ask myself sometimes, 



2o8 OF THE HILLS AND PLAINS 

whether the dwellers in those lands are not of 
my way of thinking. Is not the freedom of their 
life confined, as it were, by a certain awe and 
shrinking before the majestic and towering 
heights which rise cloud-capped above them 
everywhere ? 

Take Switzerland, for example ; to me there 
is nothingmore amazing, after the extraordinary 
character of the scenery, than the very ordinary 
character of everything else. It would seem as 
if the inhabitants had been so appalled by the 
grandeur of the hills that they sought refuge 
from their terrors in arts of the most domestic 
type,- — in the making of watches and carven 
baubles, and of buildings that might be painted 
wooden toys. Thus, one begins to realize 
that these glorious mountains, which are the 
pride of Switzerland, do indeed make of that 
land a place to visit, a place to bring marvellous 
memories from, but not a place to live in, — for 
those at least who would strive to keep in sight 
of those peaks which rise higher than any earthly 
mountains, and which can only be reached by 
the flight of the spirit. 



MOUNTAIN AND VALLEY 209 

It is, however, just this strange contrast of 
character which makes Switzerland so admir- 
able a playground for the rest of Europe ; the 
travellerwho has spent hisbreathand exhausted 
his capacity for enjoyment on the giant Alps, 
can turn from their inaccessible glories to the 
reposeful valleys where the little chalets are 
nestling and to the friendly towns of simple 
architecture, with their dormer windows and the 
careful sheltering eaves which seem to welcome 
him to the contented homeliness of the quiet 
fireside. They speak to him of that world of 
human service and human life which he has but 
quitted for awhile, and remind him, even when 
he is seeking refuge in the solitudes of the hills 
from the myriad claims which fetter the will of 
him who dwells in cities, that these claims, too, 
are sacred, — not lightly to be foregone of any 
child of man. 

The way of the spiritual life has, in truth, 
been ever the same ; ever apart from the crowd ; 
for the constant surge and wash of the seething 
ocean of human life, whilst bringing us a thou- 
sand suggestions daily, gives no pause for the 

2 E 



2IO OF THE HILLS AND PLAINS 

long endeavour of thought. " Learn," cries the 
teacher, " to despise things external, and give 
thyself over to those things that be within, so 
shalt thou see the Kingdom of God enter into 
thy soul." Solitude, silence, apartness, these 
are as the breath of his nostrils to him that 
would divine the mysteries of that school of 
sorrow redeemed and sanctified by love, which 
we call life ; yet how shall one come by these 
things whose feet are ever in the ways of men ? 

The walls of the ancient city have fallen, it 
is true, before the teeming thousands of to-day, 
and each great town rejoices as she sees her 
multitudes overlap all bounds ; but as the bar- 
riers set by human hands fall and disappear, 
the walls of that invisible prison, in which the 
spirit of man is taken captive by the day of 
small things, rise higher and higher. How 
shall a man think on that which belongs to his 
peace, if he yields himself wholly a servant to 
those things which be without ; and how shall 
he carry any message to others, who cannot 
hearken to the voice of his own soul ? 

Surely such an one, having a great desire 



THE STRENGTH OF THE HILLS 211 

towards things unseen and a craving after that 
perfection — the growth of which is checked and 
hindered by the tumult of the market-place — 
may well lift up his eyes unto the hills, and in 
the beholding them, though but for a little 
space, find that help which cometh of the Lord ! 
And it is well, perchance, that in so beholding 
them, he should be recalled, by the habitations 
of the pleasant valleys, to thoughts of those 
from whose midst he has gone forth. The voice 
of the Snow-maiden, like the voice of the Siren, 
has beguiled not a few to their destruction : the 
man who, for any cause, utterly forsakes the 
paths of his fellow-men, is by them given up as 
lost, and becomes as one of no account, being 
reckoned a dreamer of idle dreams. Therefore, 
let him beware who hears that call — be it never 
so alluring — which bids a man separate him- 
self from his company, lest in the following 
after its strange music he should become a 
castaway. 

Aubanel, in "La Sereno," his suggestive 
version of the wise old myth, bids us, indeed, 
remember that it is not given to all to see the 



2 12 OF THE HILLS AND PLAINS 

beauty of the enchantress nor to hear her voice ! 
The ship, heavy laden with human souls, sails 
by in the summer seas, all unheeding the song 
of the Siren that is raised from off the rocks — 
a song to hear at least, if not to obey ; yet none 
give ear to her words save one, and he hearkens 
unto his own death — 

" Quau vbu, dis, estre moun page,* 
E lou mbstre d'aquipage : 
Hou ! crido, un ome h. la mar ! " 

" A man overboard ! " that is the requiem to 
be chaunted over him whose desires are not 
after the pattern of his own day ! 

To me, in truth, the snowy glories of the 
high mountains have never brought the sense 
of perfect freedom which not only gives joy in 
the fulness of life, but a vision of that which is 
beyond. The message of the plains is to some, 
perhaps, more mighty than the message of the 
hills, and these love the broad plains of the 
earth. They love the shores of the tranquil 
inland sea which lies beneath the majestic vault 
of that burning heaven which, in the autumn 

* "Say ! who will be my servitor?" 



THE PLAIN OF LOMBARDY 213 

season, overhangs the vast Hungarian puszta ; 
for there, too, they may dwell for a while, as 
it were, in great spaces of silence — unbroken 
save for the flying echoes which betray the 
passing of the wild steeds whose swift feet 
haunt those sandy wastes. 

Nor less, for such as these, the charm that 
breathes in the magic sleep of the fair Lombard 
country, dreaming beneath her August suns. 
Line after line, the waves of the enchanted land 
tremble through silvery veils of vapour and 
fade beyond sight in the grave serenity of the 
southern sky. Yet the hush of all things is 
stirred with movings of secret life : the still air 
is thick with visions of the past, the voice of 
the waters sings to us with a sound as of much 
weeping, and the grapes of the vineyards are 
red as from the blood of the slain whose graves 
are under our feet. 

By all those, indeed, who seek not so much 
for solitude as for that august silence out of 
which may be most clearly heard the voice of 
the spirit, those lands are ever held most dear 
which leave the dreaming fancy free to build. 



214 OF THE HILLS AND PLAINS 

beyond the reach of human hands, a temple for 
the soul. Thus it comes to pass that when they 
tread the glittering region of the everlasting 
snows — flushing scarlet where the sunlight 
floods the crested Himalayas — these lovers of 
the hidden life turn them from the high ways 
that they may gaze where in a thousand curves 
the great watercourses enlace with silver fret- 
work the myriad cities of the plain. And, be- 
hold, the empire of the East in all its glory is 
below them ! 

Out of the night of time have come the 
chariots of her conquerors, but in vain have 
these laid low her people and trodden her 
harvests underfoot ; the ashes of death have 
but urged the bounty of the soil to richer uses, 
and given to its rulers a more fabulous wealth. 
Wide are the waving fields of grain, living 
waters rise beneath the dark feathers of the 
slender palms, a mist of domes and towers 
proclaims the ancient palaces of kings, the 
golden shrines of a million worshippers ! Girt 
about with endless distance, the great plains 
stretch from between the shining gates of dawn 



THE PUNJAB FROM THE HIMALAYA 215 

to those far shores where the mighty Indus 
meets the Arabian sea. And, as the watcher 
looks forth at nightfall, he sees from afar the 
slow approach of that floating cloud of purple 
mystery which, like a close-drawn curtain, 
comes to shroud the sleep of the imperial 
land. 

Of a truth, the majesty of the hills and the 
dreamland of the plains are alike within the 
dominion of the soul. Only let him who hath 
his delight in their beauty take heed lest he lay 
down the burden of life at the song of the Siren. 
Should such an one come out from the midst 
of men, that he may stand for a while in the 
presence of the Eternal Spirit, then let him look 
to it that he return again to their tents — even 
as Moses from the heights of Sinai — bearing 
in his hands the Tables of the Law. For in vain 
shall the seer see his appointed vision, in vain 
shall the prophet receive his inspired message, 
if he forget the service of his people. 



OF THE WOODS AND FIELDS 



OF THE WOODS AND FIELDS 



" Scriptorum chorus omnis amat nemus et fugit urbes." 

In the opening lines of the Inferno, Dante 
describes the terrors of the wood in which he 
found himself when astray from the right path. 
The words tremble on his lips as he speaks of 
the slow fear creeping over one irrecoverably 
lost. In place of the quiet shades, and the 
kindly shelter, beloved of the poets, there looms 
before us a dark haunt of mystery — the se/va 
selvaggia which harbours death and despair. 
The passage through its impenetrable shadows 
is full of deadly terror, and to recall the unseen 
horrors of its gloom is to revive an agony little 
less bitter than death. 

For Dante, as for others of his age, the 
forest conjured shapes of fear and dreadful 
awe. It may be remembered that Poliphile, 

219 2 F 2 



2 20 OF THE WOODS AND FIELDS 

when he sets forth on his search for Polia in 
the Hypnerotomachia, finds himself also in 
the depths of a forest so vast and dark that no 
ray of the blessed sun could pass through the 
thick network of leaves and branches overhead. 
In this forest, too, he is seized with fright that 
sets his pulses beating to a mad measure and 
blanches his cheek with terror ; for he fears lest 
he be devoured by wild beasts or be swallowed 
up in some unfathomable abyss. The wood 
appeared to men in those days as a haunt of 
horror and fear from which the wanderer, snared 
by clinging brambles and shaken by the men- 
ace of the unseen, could only hope to be de- 
livered through supernatural aid. 

The savage wildness of unmitigated nature 
could not fail to thrill with dread all those 
dwellers within walled cities. If the wood is 
to attract their reluctant feet, there must be no 
mystery of tangled forest paths, but a way 
made straight and plain as that to the boschetto, 
placed by Boccaccio not far from the hospit- 
able palace of the Decameron. Walking with 
slow steps through the meadows — in which 



THE BOSCHETTO 221 

the little flowers had but just begun to lift 
their dewy heads beneath the dawn — the com- 
pany could follow their guide, Emilia, in con- 
fidence and safety. No terrible wild beasts 
could have their lair in so friendly a covert ; 
and even goats and stags and other animals 
undisturbed by the pursuit of hunters — since 
the plague then reigned in Florence — came out 
from beneath the oaks, the leaves of which 
furnished chaplets for the holiday-makers, and 
being without fear, gambolled before them, 
playing now with one and now with another. 
Under the shades of even as hospitable a 
wood— tall, leafy and thick — where 

" Un ruisseau tres cler pour mettre paix 
Entre le bois et le prd se mettoit," 

the Marguerite des Marguerites encountered 
those three ladies whose amorous casuistry 
as developed in "La Coche" always offers a 
stumbling-block to such as are unfamiliar with 
the innumerable hairsplitting disputes, dia- 
logues, and allegories which it was the fashion 
of the day to weave round the question, " Che 
cosa e I'amore ? " 



222 OF THE WOODS AND FIELDS 

It was in the hour of dawn — the hour in 
which the sky changes from its deeper azure 
to pale blue— that Emilia set out with her com- 
panions over the meadows. Queen Margaret 
tells us that it was in the evening that, sick at 
heart, she quitted those who were about her, 
and wandering in the fields, found herself in a 
place favoured by heaven — 

" Par sa douceur et par sa temperance 
A la verdeur du pre plein d'espe'rance, 
Environne de ses courtines vertes, 
Oil mille fleurs k faces descouvertes 
Leur grandes beaut^s descouvrirent au Soleil 
Qui se couchant k I'heure, estoit vermeil." 

Woods such as these, that harbour by 
meadows studded with a thousand flowers and 
threaded by crystal waters, hold no place for 
visions of death and dreadful night, but rather 
enshrine the joy of life made manifest ! The 
same surroundings were the fitting setting in 
which to tell tales of amorous adventure or 
argue of nice points concerning the " bellis- 
sime regole d'Amore." Love triumphant or 
pathetic, in all its various categories, was the 
constant theme of discourse in those green 



MAY TIME 223 

fields which lay close to the pleasant woods, 
whither sorrowful ladies, like Queen Margaret, 
might carry a heavy heart for consolation, or 
Boccaccio w^ould send wandering the lingering 
feet of his happy lovers. 

In the woods and fields, too, beside West- 
minster, that great lover. Queen Guenever, rode 
on maying in the lusty month of May. Early 
in the morning she sets forth, followed by her 
knights, all clothed in green ; and as each had 
a lady behind him, "I will," she said, "that 
ye be all well horsed." At this point, it is a 
significant thing that Malory, who usually 
confines himself strictly to pure narrative, not 
wanting now and again in an admirable but 
simple dignity, suddenly waxes eloquent, and 
writes of love one of the most beautiful pas- 
sages in the English language. " The Moneth 
of May," he says, " was come, when every lusty 
heart beginneth toblossome and to bring foorth 
fruit ; for like as herbes and trees bring foorth 
fruit and flourish in May, in like wise every 
lusty heart that is in any manner a lover, 
springeth and flourisheth in lusty deeds. For 



2 24 OF THE WOODS AND FIELDS 

it giveth unto all lovers courage that lusty 
moneth of May in some thing, more in that 
moneth of May than in any other moneth, for 
divers causes ; for then all herbs and trees 
renew a man and a woman. And in like wise 
lovers call againe to mind old gentlenesse and 
old service and many kind deeds that were 
forgotten by negligence ; for like as winter 
rasure doth alway rase and defacegreen summer, 
so fareth it by unstable love in a man and in 
a woman, for in many persons there is no 
stabilitie. For we may see all day a little blast 
of winter's rasure, anon we shall deface and put 
away true love for little or naught that cost 
much thing ; this is no wisdom nor stabilitie, 
but it is feeblenessie of nature and great dis- 
worship whosoever useth this. Therefore like 
as May moneth floureth and flourisheth in 
many gardens, so in likewise let every man of 
worship flourish his hart in this world, first 
unto God, and next unto the joy of them that 
he promiseth his faith unto." 

Few indeed are they in whom wisdom and 
stability have taken up their lodging, and who 



THE SOLITUDE OF THE WOODS 225 

have learnt that the bonds wherewith a man 
hath bound his soul shall stand. The devout 
lover, the great captain, the active servant of 
men, the man of worship that flourisheth his 
heart in this world, seek, as does the Phenix, 
the wood and the kindling for their funeral 
pyre ; they are free only to choose by what 
manner of interests and desires their life shall 
find its end. The fever of pursuit may indeed 
hide from their eyes the slow accomplishment 
of the inevitable tragedy, but how fares it with 
him who obeys the injunction to " flee fro the 
prease, and dwelle with soothfastnesse " ? 

Should such an one desire to make his dwell- 
ing apart from the ways of men, he will seek, 
like Michel d'Amboise, for some secret place — 
'*le plus sou vent ou personne n'estoit." He will 
not set his face toward the trackless forests whose 
shadowy depths affright the spirit, nor turn for 
pleasure to the delightful groves bordered by 
meadows, rich in the scent of a thousand flowers 
and dear to the feet of holiday-makers; he will 
rather betake himself to the hidden solitudes 
that may yet remain not far from the very heart 

2 G 



2 26 OF THE WOODS AND FIELDS 

of life: some such "place of peace "(i) as was in 
the thought of the poet when he wrote — 

" En ce vert bois doncques m'acheminay 
Et cy et la, seullet, me pourmenay 
Dessoubz rameaux et branches verdelettes; 
Me pourmenant, pensoys mille chosettes." 

Leaving the city, a man may still find forest 
ways in which he may be alone, yet not alone. 
He may dwell in a peopled solitude. On the 
paths that lead into the eternal verdure of the 
woods, his footfall is hushed by a caressing 
silence full of delicate pleasure to the ear. For 
the silence of the woods is compact of sound ; 
it is the silence, not of death, but of life. Even 
in the snowy winter days, there is always the 
movement of hidden growth ; the sap will be 
rising in the trees, and the little mosses at their 
feet will be weaving their carpet over the bare 
spaces of the earth, or a ray of sunlight will 
stir the air with myriad invisible forms of life. 

To walk hither and thither, alone under the 
boughs and the green branches, thinking of a 
thousand things, — that is the paradise not only 

(I.) See footnote, "the place of peace," on p. 153. 



i 



THE PEACE OF THE WOODS 227 

of the dreamer of dreams, but of every one who 
wouldfain listen to thepulseof his own thoughts 
and take the measure of his day of strength. 
The dweller in the town, incessantly disturbed 
by the passions and desires of men, can make 
for himself no such secure and tranquil abiding- 
place. To follow the secret purposes of thought 
requires absolute freedom for its perfect exer- 
cise : a single thread that is foreign to its nature 
will wholly change or destroy the texture of its 
delicate web. If it would seek its own issues, 
the centre of thought must be itself; then, and 
not till then, may a man hope to come at the 
knowledge of the mysterious harmonies of life. 
Then, too, he cannot help but hear the tragic 
measure by which he may reckon his own steps 
towards the appointed end. 

" Less than half of me," wrote Michael 
Angelo, "has come back to Rome, for truly 
there is no peace except among the woods." 
Beneath the branches, under the sheltering 
shades, almost within sight of the towers of 
Westminster, we may even to-day find such a 
refuge, instinct with life, as undisturbed by any 



228 OF THE WOODS AND FIELDS 

threat of an unfriendly presence as was that 
fabled by Boccaccio to have existed when the 
plague had set its impassable barrier between 
the forest of Schifanoia and the gates of Flo- 
rence. The trees are there standing in spacious 
ranks, through which birds may take their up- 
ward flight, or the sun send down his friendly 
shafts, dappling the earth with messages direct 
from heaven. There, when the song of the 
morning birds is silent, one may hear the mid- 
day cry of the jay, the laughter of the yaffle, 
the purring and clapping of the night-jar after 
sunset. 

Should one here desire some wider circuit 
of sight, he may look beyond the forest paths 
over the plain where row on row stand in dis- 
tant line those trees of the field that are man's 
life, and mark the watercourses shrouded by 
sheets of vapour withdrawn at the last to reveal 
the outlines of the far-off hills — faintly seen 
within the clouds. On turning back, nearer 
to the ways of men, he may again follow the 
great waves of heather and gorse, of broom and 
bracken, rolling onwards till they break against 



THE PLACE OF PEACE 229 

the close curtains of a regiment of firs standing 
straight against the sky. Here, too, there 
comes from afar, to him who will listen, the 
murmur of the town, whilst the lark rises at 
his feet — 

" Ele, guindee de zeffire, 
Sublime, an I'er vire et revire 
Et declique un joli cri 
Qui rit, guerit et tire I'ire 
Des espriz, mieux que je n'dcri." 

The day of labour in this place of peace 
should bring the harmonious accomplishment 
of perfect life. The haunting rhythm of the 
hours in their sacred progress, which may fall 
unheeded on the ears of those who are busied 
with " the wrastling of this world," is hushed, 
but not silenced, by the echoes of the woods. 
To their solemn music, the fateful years unroll 
the great chart in which we may trace the hidden 
mysteries of the days, and behold those fore- 
shadowings of things to come towards which 
we know ourselves to be carried by inevitable 
steps — not gladly, indeed, but with that full 
and determined consent with which the brave 



230 OF THE WOODS AND FIELDS 

accept unflinchingly the fulfilment of law and 
fate. " For God hath not given us the spirit 
of fear ; but of power, and of love, and of a 
sound mind." (i-) 

(I.) This last passage was written at Pyrford Rough, October, 
1904, by EmiUa F, S. Dilke, who died there, peacefully and un- 
consciously, in that month and year. 



I repeat here, as a fitting close, one of the pieces 
in my wife's hand, already given at the place in which 
it stood (Editor) : — 

" Thy travel here has been with difficulty ; but 
that will make thy rest the sweeter." 



( 232 ) 



NOTES 

A, p. 151. — "And remains the figure of greatest originality in 
the history of the human spirit." 

B, p. 173. — "O joy ! O unspeakable gladness ! O life unalloyed 
of love and peace ! " 

C, p. 180. — " Fretful were we in the sweet air which is glad- 
dened by the sun, bearing within us a smoke of Accidie ; now we 
are fretting ourselves in the black mire." 

D, p. 181. — "O kindly Nature, these are thy gifts; these are 
the delights that thou extendest to mortals. To escape from pain 
is among us delight." 

E, p. 181. — " Empty joy, that is the fruit of past fear." 

F, p. 182. — "O alone eternal in the world, to whom every 
created thing turns back, in thee, Death, reposes our naked nature ; 
joying not, but secure from its pain of old." 

G, p. 189. — "He must not be called a man of letters who 
acquires letters in order to make money." 

H, p. 205. — "What does the boundless air, and that deep 
boundless sky ? What means this immeasurable solitude ? And 
what am I ? " 



TWO STORIES CHOSEN FROM 
AMONG SEVERAL THAT HAD 
BEEN INTENDED FOR A NEW 
VOLUME SIMILAR TO "THE 
SHRINE OF DEATH" AND 
*'THE SHRINE OF LOVE" 



2 H 



THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 



THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 

In a cleft between two mountains, a castle was 
set on high, at the gates of the East, so that 
all the travellers of the earth needs must pass 
it ; and within its walls was great store of such 
things as are desired of men, and it was a house 
of pleasure. The voice of fountains was heard 
in the rose thickets of the gardens ; the scent 
of violets and of jasmine was within its courts, 
' and the doors were ever open to those that were 
fain to enter. 

On a certain day, that was fixed for her 
bridal, the woman that dwelt in this castle rose 
early and betook herself to a secret chamber, 
and, having come there, she sat and looked on 
the face of her mirror, and, as she looked, she 
sang, and she sang asonerejoicingin her beauty. 
And, when she had ceased singing, she said, 

237 



238 THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 

" May I find grace in the eyes of my lord, for 
he is a man of men." And she sangyet a second 
time, and, at the second time, her song was of 
the coming of Love. 

Now, the mirror before which she sat had 
been given to her by her mother, who was a 
great enchantress, and every day the woman 
renewed her beauty in its shining, and its 
shining was as the shining of the sun. For the 
crystal balls that were on the frame were filled 
with many-coloured light, and the story of Life 
and Death was written along the borders with 
seed of rubies and of pearls, and the woman 
held the mirror more dear than all else she had ; 
and she possessed great riches. So when her 
song had its end, she looked once more on the 
image of her beauty, making the holy sign as 
she did so, and she drew an azure veil, wrought 
with many threads of silver, over the face of the 
mirror. This she did that so it might be de- 
fended from stain or hurt, for she feared lest the 
spirits of the air, passing that way, should be- 
hold themselves therein and trouble the depths 
of its shining. Then the woman went forth 



THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 239 

from that chamber, and, calling her maidens to 
her, put on the robes that had been made ready 
to her bridal; but when they would have placed 
the crown above her veil, she denied them, say- 
ing, " Nay, but my lord himself shall do that." 
Even then, they heard the sound of music 
in the air, and, looking forth from the windows, 
they beheld where the mists that hung upon the 
crest of the hills had parted at that sound, and, 
in the parting, they saw the coming of a troop 
of horsemen, and their spears were as shafts of 
silver gleamingthrough the mist. And two, the 
foremost of that company, rode with trumpets 
uplifted, and, as they came onwards, they sent 
forth a challenge of joy and gladness to the 
whole earth. And, as the echoes of that second 
blast died away, the mists altogether followed 
them, and the woman beheld her lord all 
glorious in armour that was of silver and of 
gold, and she knew the scarlet plumes of his 
helmet and the scarves of his following, and she 
turned herself about that she might make ready 
to meet him. So she went down into the outer 
courts of the castle, for she desired to await 



240 THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 

him at the gate ; and when he was come, she 
would have knelt, but he prevented her ; and 
taking from her the crown that was in her 
hands, he put it on her head and he kissed her. 

Then she made him great cheer, and wel- 
comed all his following graciously ; and when 
they were come within her gates and he had 
put off his armour, she showed him all the 
treasures of her house : there was not anything 
that she kept back from him, and she brought 
him to her secret chamber, and she unveiled 
her mirror before him. And the man esteemed 
the mirror greatly, and beheld himself therein 
gladly. It seemed to him that he had never 
known himself as he was therein revealed ; 
and they two had great joy of each other. 

Now, every year, in that country, when the 
summer was at its full, men went out in the 
woods that were about the castle, that they 
might honour the blossoming of the pome- 
granate. For, like as the budding of the may, 
in its dewy freshness, is held sacred to the 
delight of youths and maidens in the spring- 
tide, even so, in the full heat of summer, should 



THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 241 

the flower of the pomegranate be held in rever- 
ence, for it is the flower of passion, and from 
its heart springs that liking that the man, in 
his manhood, hath towards the woman. Few, 
indeed, there be that honour this flower with 
a whole heart, for this is a matter of great 
virtue, but if any possess the secret, to him are 
all mysteries revealed ; death and time are the 
slaves of its servants, neither can any shame 
or fear overtake them that worship this flower 
rightly. 

Therefore, when the day came for the gather- 
ing of the flower, the woman made a stately 
festival, remembering the love she had to her 
lord, and his constant duty and service. And 
she bid all that were willing to the castle, that 
they might bear her company, and bring back 
the flower to her walls in triumph. 

And it so happened that many came from 
afar at her request, and amongst these was one, 
a stranger, who journeyed in great state ; and 
at her arrival all eyes were drawn to her, for 
the canopy of her litter was of blue and silver, 
and it was borne by four men, that were her 

2 I 



242 THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 

slaves ; and they were Ethiopians. Now this 
woman was the daughter of a mighty chief, 
whose lands lay to the north, and there was 
a feud of long standing between that chief and 
the man that was husband to the woman that 
dwelt in the castle. And though, in those days, 
there was no open strife between them, yet 
was their quarrel unappeased, and like a fire 
smouldering, the which, if but a gentle breeze 
do stir the embers, shall send forth great flames. 
Nor had that chief been willing to see his 
daughter depart on this her journey ; but she 
would not be gainsaid. For she was angered 
by the fame of the beauty of the woman and of 
the great desire that her lord had unto her, and 
she hated her for all that drew to her the hearts 
of men, and her mind was set to divine the 
secret of the woman's power so that she might 
take her lord from her ; and she knew that she 
could do this, were she but once within their 
walls, for she was skilled in all false magic. 

When the baskets, that had been borne with 
great ceremony into the woods, were full of the 
gathering, they that carried them took them 



THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 243 

back to the castle, and they were set before the 
woman, in the garden hall, that she might dis- 
tribute the scarlet blossoms to her guests. It 
was then that she, seeing the stranger woman 
that was amongstthem, and being herself a lady 
of a noble courtesy, took thought to honour her; 
and she sent to her a branch of many blossoms 
by the hand of her lord. And the stranger, who 
was as one lying in wait, looking on it, made 
fitting thanks ; and the man, in the name of his 
lady, bid her welcome under their roof; and she 
stayed there, with all her following, many days. 
And when she had learnt the secret of the 
mirror she went her way. 

The winter months now were come, and 
during the time of snows, when scarcely might 
any one venture without the castle walls, word 
came that the mighty chief of the north had 
overpassed his borders with a great following, 
and was carrying fire and the sword throughout 
the land. This he had done at the prompting 
of his daughter ; for after her return from the 
festival of the pomegranate, she had not ceased 
to upbraid him ; and she said, " Are you 



244 THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 

dreaming or asleep that you sit idle ? Now, 
even now, you may surely take vengeance on 
your enemy. He has sheathed his sword and 
has changed his spear for a woman's distaff." 
So her father called together all that would ride 
with him, and they were a mighty company. 

They had thought thus to take that lord un- 
awares, but his defences were sure, for he was 
a great captain. Men joined themselves to his 
banner willingly ; and the snows had scarcely 
melted, before the camp in the plain beneath the 
castle walls was full of those who had espoused 
his quarrel ; and he himself, having made ready 
to ride with them, took his leave of the woman 
in her secret chamber. Together they looked 
upon the face of the mirror ; and the man's spirit 
was strengthened by that which he beheld with- 
in its shining depths, for the love that was be- 
tween these two was even as a rock that cannot 
be moved, should the waves beat upon it never 
so violently, for the foundations thereof are 
beyond sight. So the man rode on his way 
rejoicing, but the woman veiled her mirror 
with a heavy heart. 



THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 245 

And she looked forth, and called to mind 
that May morning, when it had seemed to her 
that all the earth had hearkened with her for the 
echo of his voice, and he had placed upon her 
head the crown of life ; and she comforted her- 
self, saying, " He shall doubtless return, in the 
strength of his manhood, before the flower of 
the may is set for blossom." But it was not so, 
for the war, of which he had thought soon to 
make an end, drew itself out day by day. And, 
when the summer was fully come, she had no 
heart for the accustomed festival, but it so hap- 
pened that, on that day, news was brought to 
her by which she was somewhat comforted. For 
a certain troop of horse, the best that were in the 
ranks of the enemy, had deserted to the army of 
her lord, and they reported great dissensions 
amongst the men of the north, so that the vic- 
tory over them was assured. This, however, 
they did in obedience to the daughter of their 
chief and in fulfilment of her hidden purpose. 

For when certain amongst the followers of 
her father found that the man, their enemy, was 
swift to overtake, ready of wit, and more to be 



246 THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 

feared in battle than he had been in the days of 
his youth, they reproached her, and they said, 
"Where is thy magic and thy skill to read the 
thoughts of men ? She that dwells at the gates 
of the East is mightier than thou." Then she 
made answer to them softly, and, when she had 
wrought them to her mind, she plotted with 
them how they might take the man prisoner by 
treachery, and she said, " Should he be de- 
livered into my hands alive, it shall be well with 
you ; " and that company, which was called the 
company of the Black Spears, agreed with her 
for a great reward. And her schemes found the 
easier favour with them because they knew 
themselves to be in straits ; for the man had so 
taken up his quarters that the way by which 
they would have returned to their strongholds 
in the hills was blocked by his forces. 

Now, when that company had come into the 
camp, they sought their opportunity long time 
in vain, but, at the last, an evil fortune delivered 
the man into their hands. For those of the 
north, being brave men and desperate, rejected 
the peacethatwas proffered them, and, gathering 



THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 247 

all their strength, attacked their enemies, trust- 
ing by the suddenness of their onslaught to 
have forced a way of escape. But the man 
and his followers met them in the plain, and he 
said, " Since they will have no peace, let it be 
war to the death." And he bid his people give 
no quarter. So they fought from early morning 
till the dews began to fall ; and, in that hour, 
the man, seeing that the moment had come when 
his foes might be utterly destroyed, called on 
those near him with a great cry and pressed for- 
ward, and the company of the Black Spears rode 
with him. And the ranks of the army of the 
north trembled at his voice, and their line broke, 
and they fled before the charge of his horsemen, 
and he pursued them in his wrath. Late into 
the darkness of the night, the men of the east 
pursued their flying foes, and great was the 
slaughter before any rested from pursuing, 
and being overtaken by the night, they did not 
return to their camp, but rested as they might 
upon the field. 

On the morrow, when the clouds of night 
had rolled away, the men of that army knew 



248 THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 

their victory, but their hearts were heavy, for 
they knew also that the lord, their leader, had 
been betrayed into the hands of his enemies. 
For the company of the Black Spears, that had 
been with him in his last charge, when they had 
come up with a largebody of the northern horse- 
men that had forced their way towards the hills, 
gave the signal, and on the instant the lord was 
surrounded. All theythatwould have defended 
him were slain, and he was borne down by num- 
bers and carried off the field. These things they 
learnt from the trumpeter who had ridden by 
his side, and was found, by them that made 
search at dawn, still breathing, but not far from 
death. And he died, saying, '',God help our lady 
in the East ! " for he had ridden, also, to her 
bridal. 

Not many days after, as that lady sat alone 
in the hall of mourning, there was a step on the 
threshold, and, looking up, she saw, standing 
before her, over against a pillar of white marble, 
one of the Ethiop slaves that had carried the 
blue and silver litter of the stranger at the fes- 
tival of the pomegranate ; and, when he saw 



THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 249 

that her eyes were on him, he made reverence to 
her with much humility, and said, " Oh, Lady, 
may I speak ? " and she made answer, " Speak." 

So he spoke, saying, " My mistress greets 
thee by me, and sayeth, * The battle is thine and 
the victory is with thy people ; but this advan- 
tage thou hast gained to thy hurt;' and, further, 
she sayeth, ' What wilt thou give me, that thy 
lord may go free ? ' " 

At this saying, the bitterness of death over- 
flowed her soul, for she knew that her mirror 
was demanded of her, but she made answer and 
said, " Go back to her whom thou obeyest, and 
say to her in my name, * Lo, I am thy servant ; ' " 
and the slave replied, " Lady, I will do thy bid- 
ding, and, in seven days, I will be here again, 
that I may receive from thy hands the ransom 
of thy lord ;" and, so saying, he went forth from 
the hall. 

Then the woman, clapping her hands, called 
in those that were without ; and she said, "How 
came it that you let pass unquestioned that 
slave that was here even now, so that he came 
in unto me without authority ? " And they said, 

2 K 



2 50 THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 

" We have seen no slave ; " and she dismissed 
them, and they were all much troubled, for they 
thought, " Surely, she is distraught with much 
sorrow." She, however, knew that the powers 
of darkness were upon her. 

So, rising from the place where she sat, she 
took her way to her secret chamber, and as she 
entered she saw the brilliant shining of her 
mirror even through the veil that lay above it. 
And, withdrawing the veil from its face, she 
gazed upon it in the anguish of her soul, for she 
knew that should she give the mirror to her by 
whom it was demanded, all that great beauty 
wherewith she was clothed would pass away 
with it, so that the eyes of her lord should be 
turned from her and that her place should know 
her no more. And, as she thought these things, 
the sorrow of them was heavier than the parting 
of soul and body ; and she cried out, " Is there 
no help, none ? " And, so crying, she looked up 
to the cleft in the hills, through which she had 
seen him riding to their bridal ; and the might 
of the love she bore him uplifted her spirit on 
wings stronger than the wings of the eagle; and 



THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 251 

she had joy of her giving, and said, " If it be well 
with him, it shall be well with me ! " 

And so, when the appointed hour was come, 
the woman gave her mirror into the hands of 
the slave that he might bear it to his mistress, 
and received from him the pledge of her faith. 

Hardly had she done this when a sound was 
heard, from the plains below, as of the comingof 
a great company in triumph, and the woman, 
standing on the castle walls, beheld afar off the 
standard of her lord and the gleaming of his 
golden armour ; and she put her hands before 
her eyes, for, at his right, she saw one riding, and 
the trappings of her mule were of scarlet and of 
silver. At that sight the woman went heavily, 
as one in slumber, and she left that place, and 
going down into the courts below, she stood 
before her lord as he entered at her gates ; but he 
knew her not, neither was she known by them 
of her own household, for their eyes were holden . 
But the stranger that rode upon his right hand 
looked upon her to do her evil, and she saw 
that the glory of her beauty was departed, yet 
she feared her; so, calling to her them that had 



252 THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 

charge of the gate, she said, " How comes it that 
ye suffer such an one to trouble my sight in this 
day of rejoicing ? " And she bid them cast the 
woman out. And they cast her out, but they 
marvelled greatly at this command, and said, 
"This is the first time that these gates have 
been shut against the desolate." 

As the days grew to months and the months 
to years, the fortunes of the lord of the castle 
were as his wife would have had them be ; 
for in all that country was no man so great in 
riches and in power. There was peace in all his 
borders, the chiefs of the north paid him tribute, 
and the fame of his justice, his honour, and his 
courtesy was as a fable in the mouths of men. 
Yet, though all things prospered with him, his 
spirit, at times, was clouded ; and though he 
bore his part in the great festivals that were duly 
kept within his walls, he moved in them as one 
who dreamed a dream. And his followers, who 
loved him, lamented the days of his captivity, 
believing that his thoughts went back to them, 
and that their memory was bitter. But the 
burden that lay upon his spirit was not theirs 



THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 253 

to judge, for as the days went by, it seemed to 
him that when he entered the secret chamber 
and looked, with the one at his side, into the 
mirror'sshiningdepths, somethingwas missing 
that had been revealed to him, therein, of old. 
And, in the perfect loyalty of his love and faith, 
he took shame to himself, and his heart was sore 
within him. Then she, the stranger, seeing that 
he was ill at ease, strove by all her skill to dis- 
cover his mind, but she could not, for her magic 
could not master the things of the spirit. 

Now it came to pass, that as she watched 
him, she gave less heed to her own ways ; and 
one morning, as she stood before the mirror, 
seeing him in close converse with one unknown 
to her, she made haste to join them that she 
might learn their business, and leaving that 
chamber quickly, she carried with her, in her 
hand, the veil that should have defended the 
face of the mirror from the spirits of the air. 
And hardly had she descended the stair before 
they came, rejoicing that they might behold 
themselves therein. So, on the morrow, when 
she would have restored the covering to its 



254 THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 

place, she found the silver shining of the mirror 
defiled with grievous stains and rust. And 
hearing the footstep, at that moment, of the 
man upon the stair, she made as though she 
would have hidden it, but he coming behind 
her, swiftly, withdrew the veil. And he gazed 
long on the tarnished glory of the mirror, and 
as he gazed, the trouble of his brain grew ; for 
after a while the clouds, that overhung its 
depths, parted for a little space, and he saw his 
wife wearing the robes that she had to her bridal, 
and the scarlet flowers of the pomegranate were 
in her hands, but she lay upon her bier, and the 
crown, wherewith he had crowned her on that 
day, was at her feet. Then, as the vision faded, 
the echo, as it were, of many voices chaunting, 
passed him in the air. And he would have 
spoken ; but the words failed him, and, of a 
sudden, looking strangely on her who stood 
beside him, he rent the veil, that he had taken 
from her, and casting the pieces on the floor 
between them, went out from the chamber as 
one pursued. 

She, then, put forth all her enchantments, 



THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 255 

but they could avail her nothing, nor could she 
by any means restore the shining of the mirror, 
nor make whole the veil that had been rent in 
twain. And, during all that time, the man sat 
silent, and he was as one fighting for his life ; 
but on the morning of the fifth day, when she 
would have renewed her arts by a more power- 
ful magic, the mirror vanished, and, at this, she 
was in fear, for she knew that the end of her 
power was come. Even in that moment, the 
man against whom she had practised all this 
evil came to himself, and he knew her treachery, 
and remembered him of the woman that had 
been cast out from those her gates. And in this 
memory all things became clear to him, and 
he saw the cheat that had been put upon him, 
and knew that she who had been his wife had 
paid the price of his freedom with that which 
was dearer to her than life. Anguish, now, 
laid hold of his soul, and love, swifter to over- 
take than vengeance, drove him forth to seek 
her whom he had lost. So, leaving that false 
mistress to be dealt with by those that were 
his servants, he took his way thence towards 



256 THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 

that quarter in which he believed she should 
be found, for he called to mind that sound of 
chaunting and the direction from which it had 
been carried to his ears. And, as he went on 
his way, he refused his captains, who would 
have ridden with him, saying, " This errand is 
for me alone." But they watched him until he 
passed through the cleft in the hills above and 
was hidden from their sight. 

Now, as he rode, grief and pity and love 
bore him company ; and on the breeze from time 
to time there was carried to him the sound of 
that solemn music by which he was drawn on- 
ward. It led him ever farther from the haunts 
of men, and at nightfall he lay by the wayside 
waiting only for the dawn, that he might pur- 
sue his journey, for sleep was far from his eyes. 
And, as he followed the voices, his path went 
upwards, till at the last he came to a slope on 
the hillside so steep and slippery that his horse 
could serve him no longer, so, dismounting, he 
continued his way on foot. As he turned the 
shoulder of the hill towards evening, he came 
to the outskirts of a thick wood, and beingabout 



THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 257 

to enter, he paused and listened once more for 
those sounds that had been very clear that day 
in the dawning, but now were again lost to 
his ears. As he listened, he looked towards 
the setting sun, and, so looking, he beheld the 
great plain beneath him, and he saw, far below 
at his feet, the cleft through which he had ridden 
and the walls of the castle that had been his 
dwelling-place. Even as he looked, the sun set, 
and he made haste to follow his path ; but the 
wood was thick, nor had he gone far before the 
darkness of the night came upon him ; so he 
set himself down against a tree that he might 
await the rising of the moon, which was then 
at the full. 

So waiting, the man, being sore wearied, 
fell asleep ; but his sleep was troubled, for, ever 
and again, it seemed to him that he heard the 
tolling of a bell, and then the chaunting of the 
voices that he had taken for his guide. At last, 
the moon being up, her light fell on his face 
through the branches, and, on a sudden, he 
awoke. And when he awoke he knew not where 
he was, for, whereas in the darkness he had 

2 L 



258 THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 

perceived naught but the thickness of the wood, 
the moonlight now showed him the path, wind- 
ing through a little glade in the forest, and the 
path led towards an open space, wherein stood 
a white chapel, the windows of which were of 
stained glass, and in the windows were lights 
shining, and all round that space the trunks of 
the fir trees showed like silver columns in the 
shadows. And, as the man looked, that solemn 
music for which he had listened came nearer 
to him, and he saw, walking together down the 
path towards the chapel, a company of nuns. 
Their white robes were shadowed in black, 
and as they walked they chaunted that solemn 
measure ; and when they had come up with 
him, he heard the words of their chaunt — 

" The fairest flow'r of Love 
On Earth may perfect prove, 

And yet in Heav'n be known. 
With us, it grows to height, 
But blossoms in the Ught 

Of our Lord Christ's White Throne. 
Oh, winged and godlike gift ! 
Love can our hearts uplift, 

Until they meet His own." 

As the nuns passed the man, one turned 



THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 259 

and, sighing deeply, beckoned him that he 
should follow, and he rose and followed them ; 
but when they had come to the chapel, they 
parted from him, going towards the gate of the 
convent that stood hard by. But before they 
parted, she who had bidden him join himself 
to their company made a sign to him that he 
should leave them and enter the chapel ; and 
he did so, and went up to the door. 

As the man laid his hand on the lock his 
knees trembled, and his strength forsook him. 
He waited, as one in fear, till the sound of the 
chaunting had died away. Then, liftingthe iron 
latch, he pushed open the door ; and when it 
closed behind him he found himself, alone, with 
his dead. The woman lay on her bier, as he 
had seen her in his vision, clothed in the robes 
of her bridal, her hands filled with the scarlet 
blossoms she had loved ; the crown of life was 
at her feet, but at her head the shining of her 
mirror made agreatlightofundimmed radiance. 

At this sight a storm of passion and wrath 
swept the man's soul ; and he cried aloud in the 
agony of his spirit, and it seemed to him, in his 



26o THE MIRROR OF THE SOUL 

madness, that the gates of death must open to 
his hand. But the silence of the night gave back 
no answer to his voice, and the still shining, 
that was as the glory of a blessed saint about 
the woman's head, seemed to withdraw her from 
his arm. And, as the night wore on, wrath slept, 
and all that passion that had challenged fate 
fell prostrate, and the man cast himself upon his 
knees, and he stretched forth his hands as one 
that prayed for mercy. And, as he did so, the 
light above the bier became like the sun in its 
glory, and, within its secret fires, she, the Holy 
Mother of Sorrows, in her infinite compassion, 
revealed herself to his weary eyes, and her face 
was as the face of the woman whom he had 
loved. 

When the morning dawned, the bearers 
came that should bear the woman to her burial ; 
and the man, by whom the night watch had been 
kept, followed them with bowed head. And, 
when they had buried her, he took his way back 
to the world of men. 



THE LAST HOUR 



THE LAST HOUR(^) 

A WOMAN, weary with long wandering in the 
ways of the world, came at last to the gate of 
the grave, and drew near to the steps that led 
up to it. And, seeing that it was close shut, she 
waited there for the Angel of Death, in whose 
hands is the giving of rest ; and as she waited 
she turned herself about a little that she might 
look once more upon the glory of the earth. 

The clouds of heaven were mirrored in the 
clear pool that was before the gate, and round 
about the pool were palms and aloes in blossom; 
and between their shafts and spires the woman, 
as she sat, beheld all the great beauty of the 
world. For a vast plain lay before her, stretch- 
ing from the skirts of the high mountains, whose 

(I.) Written at La Sainte Campagne, Cap Brun, Toulon, the 
winter panorama from which is described. 

263 



264 THE LAST HOUR 

peakswere clad with ice and snow, even to where 
the southern seas were spread, glittering be- 
neath the proud barriers of the earth. And the 
woman looked awhile on the majesty of the cliff 
that reared itself from the waters — rose-hued, 
purple- veined, tempest-riven, wearing the dark 
shadows of the woods as a crest uplifted against 
the infinite space of light and air. 

And she beheld the ships that were upon 
those waters, both those that went down to the 
great deeps for merchandise, and those that 
men had made ready for battle. And from 
the waves of the sea, even as from the lands 
of the plain, there came to her ears the voice 
of life. 

And, looking over the plain, she beheld the 
path of armies ; the strong defences of the hills ; 
the feet of the huntsmen that were towards the 
forests ; the labours of the husbandman in the 
vineyard ; and the presses running with wine 
and oil that were by the threshing-floors within 
his courts. And in the centre of the plain, above 
the blue vapour wherewith the evening, draw- 
ing nearer from the distant slopes, had begun 



THE LAST HOUR 265 

to veil the earth, the woman saw a strong castle 
set on a little hill, and the walls and towers of 
that castle were shining in the last rays of the 
sun, and she knew from afar off the place that 
had been the place of her birth. 

Beholding these things as she sat there 
alone, the woman remembered her of all the 
days of her life ; and she said in the bitterness 
of her soul, *' The spirit of man is even as a 
swift arrow that has missed the mark. For at 
his birth many are the gifts that are given unto 
him. He rejoices in the glory of his strength, 
and the eyes of men are made glad when they 
look upon him. The edge of his wit is as a 
sharp sword cleaving asunder things great and 
small, nor is there aught beneath the sun too 
wide for the compass of it. As his wit is, even 
so are his desires— strong in their flight as the 
wings of a young eagle. Yet nothing shall 
remain to him of all his striving, nor shall 
his strength have matched the height of his 
desires." 

And the woman said furthermore, " Short 
are the days of life, and the strength of the 



2 M 



2 66 THE LAST HOUR 

body is a false servant to the spirit of man. 
Should his gifts be many or few, a bar is set 
that he may not overpass it. Lo ! I am come 
to the gate of the grave, and are not these hands 
empty wherewith I would have handled all 
things ? Surely, had I had my will, but one 
of all those of my desires, then had the infinite 
hunger of my soul been stayed ! " 

As the woman thought on these things, the 
shades of night drew on. The smoke that went 
up from the stations of the charcoal burners 
in the forests on the hillsides was blotted out. 
The white-winged vessels drew towards the 
harbour fires; the purple rocks, that were over 
against the sea, flushed scarlet as the sun sank 
beneath the waters, and all the murmur of the 
dwellers in the plain was hushed. 

Then the Lord of the Spirit opened her eyes, 
and she saw as in a vision the souls of them 
that go down into the pit. And, looking on 
them, she was aware of the great multitude of 
such as had striven for mastery : amongst these 
she looked upon the company of those by whom 
Wisdom had been beloved beyond measure, 



THE LAST HOUR 267 

and who had sacrificed to her possession all 
the joys of life ; and there were those who had 
gathered to their own uses the hidden treasures 
of the earth and sea ; and the luxurious ones, 
who had gone softly, and all those famous ones 
who had walked in triumph ; — the armed men 
whose feet were dyed in blood. And, as she 
beheld them in that hour, they seemed to the 
woman as they had been possessed of madness, 
and it was as the madness of a House of 
Fools. 

Then, said she, " It is well for me. Nor 
shall any deem himself as poor of profit, who 
hath tasted of the fulness of life in the sight of 
the Lord thereof." And, with this saying, she 
bowed her head in worship ; for the Angel of 
Death stood before her, and the darkness of 
the night compassed them about even as with 
a shroud. The gates of the grave also were 
open. So she arose from the place where she 
had sat and placed her hand in his, and silently 
they drew within the tomb. 



INDEX OF NAMES 



Abraham, Miss. See Tennant, Mrs. 

H.J. 
Academic des Beaux Arts, 97 
Academic des Inscriptions et Belles 

Lettrcs, 63 
Academy, Royal, 34, 45, 49, 83, 88 
Academy, The, 28, 32, 34, 42, 51, 63, 

66, 68, 74, 83 
Acland, Dr. (afterwards Sir Henry), 4, 

5.23 
Acton, Lord, 65 
Aix-lcs-Bains, 44, 49, 50 
Albany, H.R.H. the Duke of, 40, 41, 

45 
Albertina, The, 26, 34 
Albrecht, The Archduke, 26 
Alen9on, S. A. R., La Duchesse d', 98 
Alma-Tadema, Sir L., R.A., 83 
Amboise, Michel d', 225 
American ancestry. See Georgia 
American Federation of Labour, 114 
Amritsar, 107 

Annual Register, 54, 55, 65, 82, 90 
Appleton, Founder of the Academy, 35 ; 

and see Academy 
Arnaulds, The, 102 
Arnold-Forster, Mrs, H. O., 124 
"Art in the Modern State," 36,67, 90, 

loi, 121 



Art Journal, The, 60, 117 
Athencsum, The, 66, 68, 85 
Atlantic Monthly, The, 38 
Aubancl, 211 
Augusta, Georgia, i, 2 
Augustine, Saint, 145, 150, 166 
Aumale, Due d', 97, 98 
Australia, 113 
Austria, 113 



B 



Bamborough Castle, 23 

Barnabei, 58 

Barrett, Colonel (C. S. A.), 2 

Beaux Arts, Academic des, 97 

Beaux Arts, Ecole des, 37, 191 

Bedford, Hastings, Duke of, 69 

Belfast, III 

Berlin, 6, 7, 34,42, 113 

Bernhardt, Sarah, 31 

Bertolotti, 34 

Bibliotheque Nationale, La, 20, 36, 86 

Birmingham, 53, 66 

Bismarck, Prince, 109 

Boccaccio, 220, 223, 228 

Bode, Dr., 55 

Bodley, J. E. C, 119, 120 

Boehm, Sir Edgar, R.A., 42 
I Boissier, Gaston, 122 
69 



270 



INDEX OF NAMES 



Bonghi, 55, 56, 58, 59 

Bonnat, Leon, 96, 122 

Bordeaux, 6 

Bouchot, Henri, 122 

Boughton, George H., R.A., 83 

Bourboule, La, 81 

Bowdich, Miss, 3 

Brantome, 174 

Bright, Jacob, M.P., 46 

Bristol, 115 

British Museum, The, 21, 41 

Britten, W. E. F., 46 

Brown, Ford Madox, 5 

Browning, Robert, 37, 38, 39, 48, 49, 

83 
Browning Society, The, 83 
Bryce, The Rt, Hon. James, M.P., 53 
Bucarest, 56 
Budapesth, 34 
Burckhardt, 55 
Burgon, Dean, 85 
Burne- Jones, Sir Edward, 39, 41 
Burty, 35, 36 
Butler, A, J., 10 



Cairoli, 59 

Caldecott, Randolph, 59, 60, 61, 62, 

63, 64, 117 
Canada, 40 
Cannes, 65 

Cap Brun, 72, 120, 263 
Carolina, South, i 
Castellani collection, 42 
Cawnpore, 3 
Chamberlain, The Rt. Hon. Joseph, 

M.P., 53 
Chantilly, 70, 97 
Chateaubriand, 165 
Chaucer, 67, 140, 146, 149 



Chelsea, 124, 125 

Christian Social Union, 109 

Christophe, 67, 75, 117 

Claude Lorrain, 66, 67, 68, 70, 71, 75, 

82,85 
Coleridge, 91 
Collins, C. A., 32 
Collinson, James, 32 
Colonna Gallery, 56 
Comte, 10, 21, 167 
Comtism, 21 

Congreve (the Positivist), 40 
Coppee, Fran9ois, 161 
Corot, 69, 71, 76 
CosindJ)olitan, The, 117 
Courtney, The Rt. Hon. Leonard, 53 
Crewe Trust, The, 23 



D 



Dalou, 46, 60 

Dampierre, 117 

Dante, 10, i8o, 187, 219 

Dean Forest, io6, 123 

Dibats, Journal des, 64 

Decamps, 97 

Delacroix, 68, 97 

Delaulne, Etienne, 36 

Depretis, 59 

Desbordes-Valmore, Mme., 165 

Detaille, 117 

Deutsch, 40 

Dicey, Frank, 45 

Dickens, Charles, 38 

Dockett Eddy, 123, 124 

Donatello, 122 

Doria Gallery, 56 

Draguignan, 35, 50, 51, 54, 59, 72, 77, 

82 
Dreyfus, Carl, 122 
Dreyfus, Gustave, 122 



INDEX OF NAMES 



271 



Duff, Mrs, Grant, 87 
Dundee, 109, 115 



E 



Earle, Mrs., 65, 82, 87 

Ecole des Beaux Arts, 37, 191 

51iot, George, 16, 17, 21, 39, 40, 49, 

50, SI, 52, 55 
' Encyclopeedia Britannica," 43, 66 
iphesus, 42 
iphrussi, Charles, 122 
Erasmus, 188 
Cugenie, The Empress, 192 



'awcett, The Rt. Hon. H., M.P., 53 

'ederation of Labour, American, 114 

'ildes, Luke, R.A., 83 

'lorence, 29, 221, 228 

'ontainebleau, 36 

"orest of Dean, 106, 123 

wtnightly Review, 53, 90, loi, 107, 
116 

"ragonard, 66 

'rancais, Francois Louis, 75, 76 

'ranchise, Women's, 45, 46 

rejus, 92 

French Architects and Sculptors of 

the Eighteenth Century," 116, 118, 

122 

French Decoration and Furniture in 

the Eighteenth Century, 116, 118 

French Engravers and Draughtsmen 

of the Eighteenth Century," 116, 119 

French Painters of the Eighteenth 
Century," Il6, 118, 122 

riedrichsruh, 109 

romentin, 66, 68, 97, 191-194 



Gambetta, 46, 73, 82 

Gavarni, 31 

Gazette des Beaux Arts, La, 67, 117 

Georgia, i, 2, 117 

Georgia, Loyalists of, 117 

Germany, 109, 113 

Gillray, 31 

Giotto, 29 

Glasgow, III 

Gloucester Place, 86 

Goethe, 6 

Gompers, Samuel, 114 

Gore House, 8 

Graham, Miss, 125, 126 

Grasse, 49, 50, 51, 60, 66, 93 

Greece, 7, 10 1 

Grimm, Herman, 33, 34 

Grosvenor Gallery, 41, 52 

Grote, Mrs., 46 



H 



Harpignies, 76 
Harrogate, 87 
Headington, 52, 87, 88 
Hereford, Bishop of, 53 
Holl, Frank, R.A., 83 
Holman Hunt, 5, 24, 32 
Hudson, H. K., 123 
Hughes, Arthur, 24 
Hullah, Mrs., 4, 8, 9 
Huxley, Professor, 53 



Iffley, 18, 31 
Ince, Dr., 4, 5 



272 



INDEX OF NAMES 



India, 88, 93, 107, 108 

Ingres, 97, 117 

I to, The Marquis, 126 



"Jahrbuch," German Art, 66, 102, 116 
Jerome, King of Westphalia, 98 
Jowett, 49 
Jusserand, J. J,, 126 



K 



Karachi, 108 
Keats, 47, 159 



La Bourboule, 81 

Labour Department of Board of Trade, 

116 
Lahore, 108 
Lamb, Charles, 189 
La Rochelle, 93 
Laurens, J.P., 66 
Leeds, 116, 123 
Legros, 40, 41, 46 
Leighton, Lord, 66, 74, 83 
Leopardi, 181 
Leopold, H.R.H, Prince, itv Albany, 

Duke of 
Liguria, 56 
Lille, 7 

Lincoln College, passim 
Lorgues, 60 
Lowell, 38 
Lucretius, 102 



M 



Maccoll, N,, 85 

Madrid, 74 

Maecenas, 182 

Magazifte of Art, The, 66 

Malory, Sir Thomas, 25, 223 

Manchester, ri2 

Manchester, Bishop of, 112 

Manning, Cardinal, 103, 104, 105, 106 

Mantz, Paul, 69 

Mathilde, S.A.I., Princesse, 98 

Maumont, The, 73 

McKenna, Reginald, M.P., 123 

Meissonier, 117 

Mellerio, See "Red Cotton Nightcap 

Country " 
Mentone, 41, 60 
Methodist Times, The, 107 
Michael Angelo, 227 
Michel, Andre, 69 
Michel, Emile, 66, 75 
Michelet, 32 

"Middlemarch," 16, 17, 87 
Midland Institute, 66 
Millais, Sir John, 5, 32, 83 
Millet, 69 

Minghetti, 56, 57 « 

Monck, Miss, 123 
Moorhouse, Dr., 112 
Moreau, Gustave, 75 
Moreau, Mme., 50, 51, 58, 50, 60 
Morley, The Rt. Hon. John, M.P., 53, 

no 
Morris, William, 53 
Morte d' Arthur, La, 25, 197 
Mulready, 4, 8, 23, 32, 88 
Municipal Corporations Act, 46 
Miintz, Eugene, 37, 50, 55, 66, 67, 68, 

69, 72, 84, 86, 118 



INDEX OF NAMES 



273 



N 



Nancy, 6, 75 

Neale, Mrs,, 2, 4 

Nettleship, Mrs,, 43, 76 

Nettleship, Professor, 53 

Neubauer, 37 

Neuville, De, 117 

Newcastle-on-Tyne, no 

Newman, Cardinal, 22 

Newton, Sir Charles, 7, 21, 37, 41, 42 

Nice, 44, 49, 50, 51, 59 

Nolhac, P. de, 117, 119 

North American Rez'iew, The, 116 



O 

OUivier, Emile, 98 
Ollivier, Mme. 6mile, 98 
Orchardson, W, Q,, R,A,, 83 
Orvieto, 67 
Oxford, passim 



Paler .10, 37 

Pall Mall Gazette, The, 53 
Paris, 60, 76, 93, 122, 123, 124 
Pascal, 16, 102 

Pater, Walter, 29, 30, 31, 34, 74, 90^ 
Paterson, Mrs, (Emma), 43, 53, 115 
Pattison, Frank, 88 
Pattison, Rev, Mark, Rector of Lin- 
coln College, 5 et seq. 
Pearson, Charles, 65 
Pearson, Miss, 65 
Percival, Dr,, 53 
Pesth, 34 
Piedmont, 56 



" Poliphile, Songe de," 219 
Pollet, Victor, 68 
Portfolio, The, 28 
Port Royal, 102 
Poussin, 66, 69, 70, 71, 72 
Poynter, Sir Edward J„ R,A,, 66, 83 
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 5, 29, 32 
Puget, 60 
Pulszky, 34 

Puvis de Chavannes, 74 
Pyrford Rough, 5, 50, 52, 88, 94, loi, 
III, 122, 123, 125, 154, 173, 230 



"Queens' Gardens" (Ruskin), 12, 226 
Quetta, 108 



R 



Racine, 48 

Radical Club, 53, 54, $8 

Raphael, 6 

Rawlinson, Canon, and family, 31 

"Red Cotton Nightcap Country," 39 

Reeves, Mrs. W. P., loi 

" Renaissance of Art in France," The, 

54, 64, 74, 121 
Renan, 37, 63, 65, 77, 119, 120 
Renan, Mme,, 64, 75, 91 
Revue des Deux Mondes, 66 
Roberts, F, M., The Earl, 108 
Roberts, Lady, 108 
Rochelle, La, 93 
Rodin, 6 

Rome, 34, 41, 55, 59, 60, 65, 73, 76 
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 5, 24, 32 
Rossetti, W. M., 32 



2 N 



274 



INDEX OF NAMES 



Rothschild, Ladyde, 65 

Roumania, 56 

Royat, 81 

Ruskin, John, 4, 5, 6, 7, 12, 17, 19, 24, 

29. 32. 33. 34> 74. 153. 205, 226 
Rutebeuf, Jacques, 169 



Sainte Campagne, La. See Toulon 1 

Salon, 41, 65, 68, 74, 75, 80 

Sand, George, 193 

Sassenay, la Marquise de, 98, 127 

Saturday Revinv, The, 19, 27, 28 

Savannah, Georgia, i, 2 

Scotland, 109 

Scott, William Bell, 23, 24, 32 

Sella, 55, 56, 57, 58 

Sheffield, iio 

Shelley, 47 

"Shrine of Death, "The, 12, 20, 22,68, 

90, 91, 92, 95, 122 
"Shrine of Love," The, 12, 20, 68, 92, 

95, lOI, 116, 122 
Siena, 67 
Simla, 108 

Smith, Miss Constance Hint on, 109, 123 
Smith, Miss Eleanor, 39, 96 
Smith, Professor Gold win, 5, 21 
Smith, Professor Henry, 39, 45 
Socrates, 151 

South Kensington, 7, 8, II, 85 
South Kensington — Art Library, 7 5 

Art Schools, 8, il 
Spectator, The, 99 
Speech House, 123 
Stephens, F. G., 32 
Stockholm, 6 
Strang, W., 93 

Strong, Captain Henry, i, 2, 5 
Strong, Nancy, 2 



Strong, Samuel S. (Deputy Surveyor- 
General of Georgia), i , 2 
Swinburne, 47 



Taylor, Canon, 107 

Taylor, Miss Helen, 54 

Tennant, Mrs. H. J., 107, 115 

Tennyson, 4, 25, 40 

Teresa, Saint, 16, 162, 166 

Thackeray, W. M., 8 

Thausing, 34 

Thierry, Augustin, 50 

Thursfield, J. R., 88 

Tokio, 126 

Toulon, 72, 120, 263 

Trade Congress, The, 52, 108, 109, ili, 

116, 123 
Trevelyan (Pauline), Lady, 23, 24 
Trevelyan, Rt. Hon Sir George, Bart., 

24 
Trevelyan, Sir Walter, Bart,, 23 
Tuckwell, Miss Gertrude, 64, 77, 85, 

107, 123 
Tuckwell, Mrs,, 45, 123 
Tuckwell, Rev. W,, 18, 123 
Tunis, 54 
Turner, 6 



U 



United Empire Loyalists, i, 117 
United States, 113 
University Bills, 57 



Var, Department of the, 72 
Velasquez, 74 



INDEX OF NAMES 



275 



Versailles, 117, 119 
Vienna, 26, 34, 53, 56, 69 
Virginia, i 
Voltaire, 27, 51 



W 



Wallace Collection, 119 

Wallington, 23, 24 

Washington, General, i 

Watts, G. F., R.A„ 4, 28, 34, 40, 41, 

83, 86, 87 
Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 90, 91 
Wedderburn, Lady, 126 
Wedderburn, Sir William, 126 
Wesley, 103 

IVestminster Rez'iew, The, 27, 29, 42 
Whiting, Francis, 3 
Wildbad, 44, 49, 50 
Woburn Abbey, 69 
Women's Congress, International, 113 



Women's Protective and Provident 

League. See Women's Trade Union 

League 
W^omen's Trade Society, Oxford, 76 
Women's Trade Union League, 43, 44, 

52, 53, loi, 106, 108, 109, 114, lis, 

116, 121, 123, 124 
IFome/i's Trade Union Review, 109, 123 
Woolman, John, 188 
Woolner, 32, 83 
World, The, 49 



Yorkshire, 87 



Zola, 46, 47 



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